Another UK academic boycott is a near certainty

On Wednesday, the recently combined UK higher education union, UCU, will vote on whether to pass a boycott motion on Israeli academic institutions.

Adloyada was set up back in August 2005 partly to argue that the then proposed merger of the prestige university union, AUT, with the predominantly community college union, NATFHE, would be a disaster. And not only in terms of its likely propensity to bring on the very boycott that AUT members had thrown out in May 2005. The proposed union, I repeatedly argued, would be driven by the absurd gesture revolutionary politics that had so characterized the hard-left dominated NATFHE over many years. This gesture politics included housing the Stop the War campaign and paying for its general secretary to stand on Stop the War platforms urging school students to come and demonstrate against President Bush on his 2003 visit to London.

There was no shortage of evidence about the virulently anti-Israel line of NATFHE, with its long-standing affiiation to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which campaigns for a total boycott of all cultural and economic contact with Israel, and which regularly hosted the then General Secretary of NATFHE on its platforms.

However, to my dismay, not only was there little interest by independent-minded left wing bloggers in this issue, but the Jewish community seemed to have franchised out its acknowledged concern about combating potential academic boycotts of Israel. It effectively left it to the soft Trotskyist group Engage, a small group of primarily AUT and Labour Party members, but also with very strong links to the tiny Trotskyist political group, Workers' Liberty.

It seems the worthies holding the relevant positions in the Jewish Board of Deputies congratulated themselves on their sagacity in leaving it to Engage to take on the anti-zionist left in the universities within their own absurdist Marxist realm of discourse. After all, had it not worked successfully in defeating the AUT proposed boycott motion of May 2005?

Engage, it seemed to me, played a consistently obfuscatory and wrong headed role in this situation. They ritually made claims that Israel was racist and oppressive. They followed the standard British line of claiming that "the occupation" was the real source of terrorism and conflict. They indicated that what was really wrong with the proposed boycott was it was targeting the wrong people-- after all, they argued, were not Israeli universities at the heart of opposition to the occupation?

Worst of all, they refused to recognise the proposed merger of the union for the disaster it promised to be. They ignored the horrendous history of the larger union, NATFHE, with its packed board and caucuses of hard left vote fodder, despite NATFHE's 2005 conference having lined up to express support for a boycott by a margin of several hundred for and just two against.

"I'm for one big union" enthusiastically crowed leading Engage member Jon Pike shortly before the election. Sadly but predictably, that article subsquently disappeared from their web site.

The elections for the new executive and secretariat of the merged union were again crowed over by Jon Pike in an article on the Engage web site at the time because of the election of Sally Hunt as General Secretary:

She has committed herself to offering a ballot of the membership of the UCU before any academic boycott of Israel becomes the policy of the union.

This means, in practice that a formal UCU policy of boycotting Israeli universities is increasingly unlikely. We can speculate on whether an academic boycott proposal would be defeated by 80/20 or 90/10, or (my guess) an even higher proportion. But no-one who knows UK academia will expect such proposals to pass the scrutiny of the rank and file membership of the union. The AUT leadership also acted quickly to repudiate the Natfhe "individual boycott" resolution of 2006.

But this was an example of the typical willful selectivity of Trotskyist groups like Engage. For those same elections had also resulted in a UCU executive packed with members of its hard left caucus, and that Executive now includes a large number of members of the Socialist Workers' Party, Stop the War acivists, and the leading pro-boycott activist Sue Blackwell. Before the merger, Sue Blackwell never got anywhere near election onto the executive of the AUT, and neither did most of the SWP diehards like Malcolm Povey, who now sit alongside her.

So surprise, surprise. On Wednesday, a motion will be voted on to boycott Israeli universities. Given the present UCU executive and the obvious seamless takeover of more pragmatic AUT politics by the hard left dominated caucusing of the old NATFHE mafia, the vote in favour may well be overwhelming. After all, it was 200 odd to 2 in the old NATFHE.

I predict a boycott motion will be adopted. I would dearly love to be proved wrong.

Comments

[Hip Gnosis]

"[Engage] ritually made claims that Israel was racist and oppressive."

Judy, the link you provide in this sentence is confusing, as it appears to refer mostly to an article written by Shalom Lappin that you yourself praise. What you mean to refer to is surely whatever is behind the last link in the post of your own that you now link to – but that last link is now dead, Engage (with their characteristic practice of not letting the record stand if it doesn't suit them) having taken the offending article and comments off the air.

[Fred Beloit]

How dare the Israelis defend themselves from those who wish to wipe them out. How selfish. Leave it to the UK academics to straighten them out. It's the British Left thing to do, isn't it?

[jed nigtingale]

A boycott of Britain is justified, and long overdue. Britain is responsible for the death of thousands of innocent Iraquis, starting an ill-planned war, and not having any idea on how to end the civil war in Iraq . Britain will just leave Iraq in a few months, leaving the Middle East in a terrible state. In addition the intolerable Apartheid situation of Britain 's minority populations is just shocking. For all the boycott-fest that British academia has just unleashed on Israel , can someone tell me why there are so few minority professors, prime ministers, chiefs of staff, etc in Britain . British labor forces need to concentrate their efforts in breaking down the apartheid stranglehold that the British society has on its minorities that have suffered for several generations in despicable ghettos. Until these injustices are corrected, the world should boycott Britain , her institutions and her products.

Jed Nightingale
New York

[Bill]

The boycott is a symptom of academic freedom going down hard, not from administrators or governments as we always complain, but from the very unions and faculty that are supposed to enable and protect it. Moreover for these so called “progressive” boycotters, boycotting Israel is easy (on many campus you may as well be voting against punching premature babies in the nose, the bias is against Israel-and-only-Israel is *that* pervasive). I fear that it’s also good field test of what could come. Who else and what other ideas will be regulated through the union pressure now that they are dominated by sanctimonious politically correct fascists?

I have appreciated Engage's efforts. But I have been very disappointed in their need to be "the Left against the boycott" rather than be just be "against the boycott." Nothing all that wrong with being "Left." But they seem to have produced the image that only *they*, as leftists and progressives, have the moral gravitas to oppose the boycott. Worse still, sometimes they act as if it’s a trade union issue.

For example, I just can't see them standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a university group of Conservatives in a debate against anti-progressive boycott advocates. I'm hardly conservative, but I'd do it in a heartbeat give then broader implications of a boycott against Israel-and-Only-Israelis-at-least-until-we-want-to-take-the-universe-out-on-someone-else.

Academic Freedom must always be a party neutral matter. And by subcontracting things to a group that self-identifies with one end of the political spectrum, the ball may indeed be lost.

[David Frankfurter]

See Self-selection: anti-Semitic academics face extinction

[szeni]

I agree about Engage looking silly bending over backwards to prove their Mid-East 'objectivity'. But why is it a 'soft Trotskyist group'? I think their natural home is Euston manifesto-type social-democracy

[Soft Trotskyist]

"And I'm pretty sure the motion I reported earlier in my post on the line-up of pro and anti-boycott motioneers, which was to compel any move to a boycott to be put to the whole UCU membership was lost."

Wrong Judy.