The Meaning of the UK Campaign for an Academic Boycott of Israel

INTRODUCTIONWhat does the academic boycott of Israel by trade unions representing British academics tell about British attitudes to Israel and the Middle East?Many Israelis and American Jews tend to view it as classical antisemitism. Sometimes they generalize, assuming that this was a reflection of a general disposition in Britain toward antisemitism. Others tend to dismiss the boycott campaign as the ranting of a small and insignificant minority; while the boycott campaigners and their sympathizers tried to present their actions as legitimate criticism of Israel. However, these are all misperceptions.The boycott campaign was driven by a small cadre of extreme Left anti-Zionist activists. While not driven by classical antisemitism or hostility to Jews per se, their approach often gave expression to the New Antisemitism, which discriminates against, and demonizes, the Jewish State: Israel, and by extension Jews politically supportive of Israel. Although their underlying ideology lacks significant appeal in the UK, they were able to leverage their power by gaining control over the policy of trade unions with hundreds of thousands of members. Outside the trade union movement, they gained a significant amount of sympathy on the moderate Left and have contributed to shifting the boundaries of legitimate debate in the UK regarding Israel and the Middle East. While the movement has not succeeded in sustaining an academic boycott of Israel, it would be a mistake to dismiss it as politically irrelevant.THE ACADEMIC BOYCOTT CAMPAIGN: A CHRONOLOGYApril 2002: British lecturers Stephen and Hilary Rose's petition in the Guardian calls for a halt on European research collaboration with Israel. To lead the boycott campaign they set up the British Campaign for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP, http://www.bricup.org.uk/) and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI, http://www.pacbi.org/).May 2002: Mona Baker of the University of Manchester Institute for Science and Technology (UMIST) fires Israeli academics, Miriam Shlesinger and Gideon Toury from the editorial board of her journals, because they are Israeli.May 2003: A motion at the Association of University Teachers (AUT) Council proposes a full academic boycott of official Israeli institutions, including universities. The motion is defeated.April 2005: The AUT decides to boycott two Israeli universities.May 2005: AUT Special Council meeting reverses the decision. This meeting has much better attendance than any routine council meeting.May 2006: The larger academic trade union National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) votes for a motion at its conference, three days before it merges with AUT, to boycott Israeli academics who don't publicly dissociate themselves from apartheid policies. The policy lapses with the dissolution of NATFHE.May 2007: First Congress of the new =University & College Union (UCU). New pro-boycott motions passed.September 2007: The UCU cancels the implementation of the new pro-boycott resolutions, after receiving legal advice that the motions were in contravention of British anti-discrimination legislation.May 2008: The UCU ignores its own legal advice and passes more pro-boycott resolutions, but they are not implementedTHE IDEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL ROOTS OF THE ACADEMIC BOYCOTTThe ideological roots of the boycott movement lie within the extreme Left of British politics. After the Six Day War, Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda greatly intensified, incorporating classical antisemitic motifs. Although, the New Left viewed itself as independent of Moscow, Soviet language found an echo in the pronouncements of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain, which demonized Zionism as racist and colonialist. In fact, the SWP went further than Moscow by denying the State of Israel's right to exist. …