The Sunday Times
3 June 2007
A bad boycott
It is important to keep in perspective last week's vote by the University and College Union to begin the process of a boycott of Israel. No boycott is yet in place. The vote, disgraceful as it was, means only - so far - that the union will circulate to its branches a call for a boycott. Of course the union has no power to force anyone to boycott anything. The same applies to the National Union of Journalists, which in April also called for a boycott of Israel.
That said, the UCU's decision is shameful and goes against the foundations of intellectual pursuit and communal learning which are the basic purposes of universities. That any academic should consider it right to refuse to engage with another academic for no other reason than his or her country of origin is disturbing.
It is also deeply misguided. As Dr Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University, the only Arab university in Jerusalem, put it: "An international academic boycott of Israel, on pro-Palestinian grounds, is self-defeating: it would only succeed in weakening the strategically important bridge through which the state of war between Israelis and Palestinians could be ended and Palestinian rights could therefore be restored. Instead of burning that bridge, the international academy should do everything within its power to strengthen it including, foremost, through its own collaborative intervention." But given the posturing and political blinkers of the leaders of the boycott campaign, it is not surprising that they place their own views ahead of those who would be affected by a boycott.
So it is all the more disappointing that the strongest criticism made by Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, to condemn the UCU's vote was simply that a boycott "does nothing to promote the Middle East peace process". Well, yes. But as the minister responsible for the institutions which would be involved in any boycott, Mr Rammell really should have pointed out the more fundamental problem with the vote: that it undermines the basis of education itself.
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