A decade ago, maybe even five years ago, the story I’m about to tell could never have happened.
A few weeks ago, the Association of University Teachers here in Britain decided to launch an academic boycott of two Israeli universities. An internal debate ensued and as a I write these words, the union is reconsidering its decision.
Unions often pass resolutions on international affairs, expressing their solidarity with this or that cause. This is nothing new and it goes back to the very earliest days of the British trade union movement. What it utterly new is the fact that such decisions now travel at the speed of light through the Internet — and the debate around them is instantly globalized.
The AUT decision was, of course, a controversial one. And just before its meeting to reconsider the boycott, the AUT learned of a resolution passed by the largest union of college and university faculty in the United States, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT, which represents some 150,000 college and university faculty, called on its sister union “to reverse their vote” on the boycott. The AFT’s Executive Council stated in its resolution that “boycotting universities and their faculty is anathema to academic freedom”.
Now, I can’t remember the last time that something like this happened.
And regardless of what one thinks of the AUT’s original decision, or the AFT’s intervention, it is indeed an extraordinary development that a union in one country would call upon a sister union in another country not to boycott a third country. And I think this intervention is a direct result of the new communications technology.
The Internet has been absolutely full of information on this debate. The AUT’s own website at http://www.aut.org.uk/ has had information of course, and those supporting or opposing the boycott have set up sites of their own, most notably Engage, at http://liberoblog.com/. The moment the debate was publicized on the Internet, it was globalized. The anti-boycott statement on the Engage website, for example, was signed by teachers and others not only from Britain, but from the USA, Canada, France, Israel, and Australia. Palestinian academics and others have come down on both sides of the debate.
It used to be the case that an internal debate by a national trade union remained that — internal and national. No longer. The new communications technologies have erased old boundaries, and the intervention of a union in the United States in an internal union debate here in Britain now seems entirely natural and normal.
Although involvement of the Internet is a first, it is not the first time a racist pariah state has been boycotted at the university level. Boycotts were also applied to Apartheid South Africa, leading to similar tension between the aims of the boycotts and the competing values of academic freedom. There are real considerations on both sides of this, and tactics which impede the free flow of scholarship may turn out to do little good and considerable harm.
Dion Giles
Western Australia
This is a question of competing principles.
Of course academic freedom needs to be defended, but from governments, not unions! The question of academic freedom is less the issue here since no one is restricting academic enquiry or endeavour.
Instead the other principle comes into play: it is morally wrong to have dealings with a repressive apartheid state.
Personally I think the second principle far outweighs any argument that could be given in support of the first.
If Israel were not a repressive state we would not need to boycott its institutions. Also, if we do not boycott the universities what incentive is there for Israel to stop being repressive?
Of course the misguided AUT position proposes to restrict academic inquiry–by restricting the form of cooperation academics can undertake.
If Mike wants to blacklist the universities of “repressive states,” which universities does he want to permit cooperation with? Sudanese? Saudi? Iranian? Cuban? Uzbeki? Egyptian? Which of these states is not, to use his word, repressive?
Let’s get serious.
Todd wants to “get serious” so let’s do that by looking at those countries he has listed:
Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Cuba, Uzbekhistan, Egypt. Add Israel to the list and now pick out the only one that has been constantly in violation of UN resolutions, has invaded its neighbours’ territory, has refused to hand back territory it has occupied for nearly 40 years and has been guilty of some pretty terrible human rights abuses constantly for over 50 years?
If “academic inquiry” is the only criterion to be considered here, what would have been said if Mengele had used the same argument?
I am glad to see you have this feature though since you listed a site Engage that was against the resolution, shouldn’t you list one that was in support?
I do support the resolution to boycott the Israeli Universities much like I supported the boycotts against Apartheid.
As for Mr. Gitlin’s comments, while I don’t know the particulars for some of the countries listed by him as repressive, I would suggest that Cuba should not be listed as one of them.
The actions of the AUT have sadly brought the wrong kind of attention to the trades union movement in this country. Members have resigned, and foreign academic institutions and unions have attacked the AUT.
The AUT would be better advised to focus on the interests of its members and on promoting international solidarity that we can all support, rather than allowing a small clique of SWP activists and their sympathisers to dictate policy to thousands of academic and support staff in boycotting the free academic institutions (that also teach Arabs, both Israeli and Palestinian) of a fellow democracy.
If we want to achieve peace in the Middle East then we ought to be encouraging academic and other contacts with both sides of the political divide. That’s how the Palestinians can be meaningfully helped.
I thought that was wha the labour movement was meant to be all about?
The boycott is needed on every level. We are dealing with the second more vile and violent regime in the world next to the U.S. The more pressure placed at every level, the more likely Israeli academics will put pressure on their murderous government to change their genocidal policies against the Arab people.
Left off of everyone’s lists of states that invade other countries, refuse to return occupied territory, oppress indigenous peoples, and has been–and continues to be–guilty of some pretty notable civil and human rights abuses for well over 50 (say, well over 200) years. I refer, of course, to the good old USA.
I hold no brief for the current government of Israel, but those who support this boycott march beside Holocaust deniers and other anti-Semites.
If the internet (a military invention) has facilitated the debate between the AUT and the AFT on the boycott of Israel’s universities, then we are almost seeing swords beaten into ploughshares. The next step will be for more individual academics to forswear their loyalties to ANY University, Union or Nation, and use the internet to cut a straight and true furrow across all these political boundaries, …. to the point of hemlock.
“Those who support this boycott march beside Holocaust deniers and other anti-Semites.” What a vile slur. Goebbels at his worst.
Are the many Jews who criticise Israel’s current policies anti-semitic?
I note, from a quick googling of Dion Giles, that he is a chemist with no qualifications, no experience of teaching, and no research interests.
http://wwwscience.murdoch.edu.au/cgi-bin/phone.cgi?ID=tkkwjfdrfd
In fact, further googling of Dion Giles suggests that s/he is an expert on every subject under the sun, other than Chemistry.
You are indeed fortunate to have such a polymath posting in this forum. I hope people will treat the characterisation of Israel as a “racist pariah state” with all the seriousness it deserves.
Let’s face it — an academic boycott is academic. If we want to make Israel reconsider its policy of oppressing Palestinians, we need an economic boycott. We could start with the War on Want call to the UK government to press for suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement that gives Israel trading preferences but which also demands that Israel observe human rights, something it has singularly failed to do.
A Canadian viewpoint:
“The Wall Must Fall” is a booklet put out by CUPE BC, a division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the largest union in Canada at over 500,000 members. It is meant as an educational resource for its members. To that end, it raises probing questions. For example:
I think talking of anti-semitism and talking of holocaust whenever somebody tries to criticize Israels policies in Palestine, is a kind of blackmail just meant to shut up any kind of criticism. It doesn’t do any good to the Jewish people. I also think that it is of bad taste to compare Israeli policies with nazism.
But I do believe the boycott of Israel makes sense. More and more voices in Palestine and even within Israel support a boycott, because nothing else seems to work. Moreover, if I remember it well, the Brittish academic boycott was not a wild action but a campaign that mainly targeted two universities that were clearly supporting Israels occupation policies, among them the university that supported the establishment of a real campus in the illegal settlement Ariel.
There is a good argument I once heard why to boycott Israel and South-Africa, and maybe not other regimes that certainly deserve the pressure just as much; because a boycott can only work in a country with some kind of democracy, where leaders are accountable to their citizens. If they don’t have to care about their people, regimes just let the people suffer and go on with the policies that brought the boycott upon them – a good example was Saddam’s Iraq, where civilians suffered enormously from the boycott but the dictator stayed on for ten more years.
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“As Canadian Jewish Outlook editor Carl Rosenberg writes in his foreword:…”
I *love* tokenism.
That said, it would be nice if folks would concentrate on the ideas, not the imagined identities of those uttering them.
“I think talking of anti-semitism and talking of holocaust whenever somebody tries to criticize Israels policies in Palestine, is a kind of blackmail just meant to shut up any kind of criticism.”
That’s not very charitable … as it happens, no, it’s not in bad faith. (Which is what I have to assume you mean by “blackmail” — unless you think there are shadowy forces with the ability to do something more than respond on a Web board. In which case, blackmail there might indeed be.)
Criticism of Israeli policies is, certainly, often a good thing. Hell, policy critique is almost always useful! But I don’t think that’s what brings on the countercritique (“blackmail”, in your response) of racism. Rather, it’s the content of the critique — because the critique is often not one of Israeli policies but of Israel’s existence.
Which, in itself, is obviously not necessarily antisemitic. Some countries just shouldn’t, perhaps, be. I myself would very much like to see Turkey and Greece merge at some point in the near future; the disappearance of the Armenian nationalist project in, well, Armenia would probably bring a great deal of peace to Nagorny-Karabakh, Azerbaijan, etc.
Just kidding. But, indeed, one might very well suggest that nation-states and, to be consistent, their federalised versions are Bad Ideas. So Israel — and Quebec, and Catalonia, and Finland — should perhaps be dissolved.
But the anti-Zionist slur often has nothing to do with the critique of nation-states. Or is only partly about nation-states. Often, and invariably in many circles, it is about denying Jewish peoplehood. It’s not that peoples shouldn’t have self-determination, that flawed Westphalianism can be shed only slowly, it’s just that Jews are, well, a loosely-connected group of coreligionists with little to do with one another from country to country, and certainly with nothing to do with the Middle East.
Yes, that will get many Jews’ backs up. And I’m certainly among those who call that brand of anti-Zionism — which, for reasons I don’t get, labels itself “policy criticism” when, of course, that is certainly not its goal — racist. And, specifically, antisemitic.
I’m amazed: Not one single comment about the AUT boycott has mentioned the fact that the defence of academic freedom so many hold dear is denied to the Palestinians at every level from nursery to university. The state, the Israeli army and settler thugs impede Palestinians’ education on a daily basis. Shame on those who defend academic freedom for some and not others: that is not freedom, it is apartheid.
I cannot decide whether Israel is a racist state or not to be honest, but it doesn’t help when one of the universities – Haifa – (briefly) boycotted by the AUT holds a conference addressed by academic and political luminaries alike where the title is “the demogrpahic problem”. For those less familiar with the semantic games so frequently played by defenders of Israel’s actions, the so called “problem” they are referring to here is the increase in the Palestinian birth rate.
And the critics of Israeli state actions should remember that the conflict is not about deligitimizing Israel but about supporting the people Israel militarily represses.
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Not one single comment about the AUT boycott has mentioned the fact that the defence of academic freedom so many hold dear is denied to the Palestinians at every level from nursery to university.
Well, yes. Those who believe that the main threat to academic freedom in occupied Palestine is the Israeli military occupation know very little of academic life in occupied Palestine, however.