Stop the Boycott

Dear friend,

We would like to bring you up to date with some important developments in the campaign against an academic boycott of Israel.

What happened?

• At its last meeting on Friday 14^th March, The University and College Union (UCU)’s National Executive Committee (NEC) voted to submit a motion to the Union’s annual Congress in May. The motion is an attempt to reintroduce a boycott of Israeli academics.
• This NEC motion was proposed to the poorly-attended meeting by Tom Hickey, a Socialist Workers Party activist, and was seconded by Linda Newman, UCU’s president.
• All of this is despite the UCU accepting advice from its own lawyers, under pressure from the Union’s Trustees, that a boycott would be unlawful. This brought to an end 2007’s UCU policy promoting a boycott of Israeli academics, which dominated the Union’s business for eight months.
• The new motion is similar to the 2007 motion – both call on UCU members to reconsider academic links to Israeli institutions.
• Stop the Boycott originally supported the call by UCU members to ballot the entire membership on the question of a boycott - the Socialist Workers’ Party, which promoted the 2007 policy, admitted that in a democratic ballot “the boycott would almost certainly be heavily defeated" .
  

The motion

• The motion submitted by the NEC claims there is “Apparent complicity of the Israeli academy” in Israeli government policies towards the Palestinians, and that UCU should “promote a wide discussion by colleagues of the appropriateness of continued education links with Israeli academic institutions”.
• The scope of the motion is all Israeli academic institutions, including universities, colleges and schools.
• If UCU were to implement the motion, it would encourage its 160,000 members to consider cutting off links with Israeli academic institutions – most of these links are with individual Israeli academics such as research partnerships, peer review of papers, or academic conferences.
• The motion initiates ‘greylisting’ against Ariel College in the West Bank, a long procedure that can end in a formal boycott; however, this is actually a weaker procedure than the boycott against all universities, promoted in the rest of the motion.
• The motion encourages actions like silent boycott activity, as well as explicit boycott action (below).

Impact of Silent boycott

• The ‘Silent Boycott’ is where Israeli academics are the victims of secret discrimination.
• For example, if an Israeli has an academic paper rejected by a journal, he or she won’t know if the rejection was because of poor quality work or because the referee is boycotting Israel.
• The silent boycott creates suspicion and damages the integrity of the Peer Review system, which is the foundation of the international academic community.

Impact of explicit boycott actions

• The UCU motion, if adopted, would turn UCU into a vehicle for encouraging members to openly and explicitly boycott Israeli academics.
• As an example, in 2002 Prof Mona Baker of UMIST fired two Israelis, Miriam Schlesinger and Gideon Toury, from the boards of two academic journals because they were Israeli academics.
• The UCU motion institutionalises and encourages actions like rejecting academic papers from Israeli authors, cutting off research partnerships, and refusing to allow Israeli PhD students to work in British university departments.
• UCU members might reasonably expect the Union to defend them from action by their universities if they take open boycott actions like those above.

Next steps

• The UCU NEC is acting recklessly and promoting discrimination by taking a pro-boycott position similar to that which was found to be illegal. It is farcical that a small minority has hijacked the union in this way.
  
• In this scenario, union members are likely to challenge the NEC’s decision to reopen this issue through the courts.
• Stop the Boycott will support and empower to any union members who choose this course of action through seeking  our own legal opinion.
• A number of UCU members have already been in contact; if you are a UCU member and interested in further action, please contact us on campaign2008@stoptheboycott.org

Commenting on the UCU NEC's action, Henry Grunwald QC, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said:

“Last year’s successful campaign to defeat the previous boycott proposal demonstrated that our community is committed and able to deliver an effective and hardhitting response to boycotts wherever they come from.

STB will once again co-ordinate the community’s efforts with those partners inside the UCU to overturn these flawed proposals.”

Lorna Fitzsimons, Chief Executive of BICOM, said:

“It is absolutely farcical that a small and unrepresentative minority has hijacked the Union and resurrected this discriminatory and unpopular motion. We’ve been here before, defeated it and will do so again. We know that most ordinary Union members don’t want anything to do with this and we will work closely with many of them to help them fight it within the Union.

“The UCU know that we can tackle this politically and win it politically, but this must be put to bed before it gets that far. Last year the UCU declared, under pressure from Stop the Boycott and others, that boycott action was illegal and unenforceable. In the face of the UCU’s steadfast refusal to now publish their legal advice, we are seeking our own legal advice so that individual UCU members can use this to stop the plans for a boycott immediately.”

Jeremy Newmark, Chief Executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, said

"Even the SWP admit that in a democratic ballot, the boycott would be heavily defeated. UCU members overwhelmingly believe that boycotts are bad for British academia, bad for the Palestinians and do nothing to promote peace in the Middle East. By bringing this motion to Congress, UCU's Executive is once again relying on an unrepresentative, factionally dominated conference to foist a discriminatory boycott policy on their membership."

Other News

• UCU held elections for its NEC during February – half the committee’s seats were up for election.
• Jon Pike, an Engage activist who worked to overturn academic boycotts of Israel in 2005 and 2007, was elected to the NEC. Also elected were several members of the broadly anti-boycott Unity Network
• The new NEC members will replace their predecessors in June.