UK ACADEMIC BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL DEAD?

UK Academic Boycott of Israel is Defeated (LGF)
For a change, we have some good news to report from the UK this morning, where the ugly campaign to boycott Israeli academics has been defeated.

The Engage Forum has a report, and they say the decision is “absolute and final.” I’d like to believe that, but the people who promote these vile movements always find a way to come back and try again.

The campaign for an academic boycott of Israel has ended today in an absolute and final political, legal and moral defeat.

The University and College Union’s (UCU) own lawyers advised it that a policy to exclude academics who work in Israel from the global academic community – and to exclude nobody else on the planet - would have been a violation of equal opportunities legislation in Britain.

Given this legal advice, the leadership of the UCU had no choice but decisively to end the union’s flirtation with a boycott of Israeli academia. To persist in a ‘discussion’ of an illegal and discriminatory policy would have opened the union up to potentially fatal lawsuits on the grounds of unfair discrimination. Union members could have been held personally liable if they had ignored clear legal advice. The Opinion was given to UCU by a widely respected barrister. ...

It will be claimed by the campaign to exclude Israelis from our campuses, conferences and journals that the end of the boycott in UCU represents a capitulation to ‘bourgeois’ or ‘Zioinst’ law (the two adjectives have become inter-changeable amongst some ‘anti-Zionist’ ‘anti-capitalists’). In truth, however, anti-discrimination law is not a mode of state repression but a victory, hard-won, by generations of antiracist activists. It is a good thing that there is law in place which prohibits bodies like our union from discriminating against Jews. In the old days there was no legal prohibition on Jewish quotas and silent or explicit exclusions and boycotts of Jews by civil society organizations such as universities, golf-clubs and trades unions. The exclusion of Jews is no longer a private matter of choice for an organization; it is now illegal. This is good.

It is scandalous that the proposal to exclude Israeli academics was seriously considered by political people, trade unionists and by our union. It was a proposal for direct unfair discrimination on the grounds of nationality and for a policy of indirect unfair discrimination against Jews. It was, in effect if not in intent, a racist proposal. Engage, the network which came together to oppose the boycott, the antiracist campaign against antisemitism, said, from the beginning, that it was a racist proposal. People who consider themselves to be antiracists and who were seduced by the plan to punish Israeli academics for the consequences of the Israel/Palestine conflict should be ashamed that it took ‘bourgeois’ law to finish off this racist proposal.