The Economist magazine criticizes the British union's call for a boycott of Israel

The prestigious Economist magazine criticizes the British academics' union call for a boycott of Israel, as did Tony Blair during Question Time. Such a relief to hear a few sane voices amidst the hatred and ideological rhetoric. --Wendy Leibowitz

Boycotting universities
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9340508
Slamming Israel, giving Palestinians a free pass
Jun 14th 2007
From The Economist print edition

A strangely one-sided boycott in Britain stirs global rage

ALMOST everybody loves a nice, neat stereotype, and Yair Lapid, an Israeli writer and talk-show host, is no exception. Adding his own voice to the international chorus of indignation over a threatened British boycott of Israeli academia, Mr Lapid imagines the learned gentlemen pondering their scurrilous decision.

"The blue-grey smoke wafts from their pipes, their foreheads wrinkle, a watch on their wrist sits underneath the sleeve of a Harris Tweed jacket, with its leather elbow patch," Mr Lapid muses in Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli daily newspaper, as he contrasts England's dreaming spires with his daily experience of rocket attacks and suicide bombs.

In reality, of course, British professors are a variegated species—as likely to be wearing soiled denims as well-cut tweed—and exactly the same goes for Israeli ones. Along with quite a few of his compatriots, Mr Lapid regards his country's campuses as "fortresses of the radical left"—though he clearly finds enough merit in them to consider them worth defending from the absent-minded academics of Albion.

No such spirit of subtlety or differentiation was evident in the vote taken on May 30th at the inaugural conference of a newly formed association of British academics, the University and College Union, which claims to speak for 120,000 teachers and other employees. A mere 257 of them took part in the "anti-Israel" ballot, with 158 voting in favour and 99 against. In favour of what, exactly? To be precise, what they endorsed was the circulation (to all the union's branches, for "information and discussion") of the full text of an appeal by Palestinian trade unions to boycott Israeli academic and cultural activities.

Things are not going to move very fast, at least in the dons' view of things. Local branches of the UCU will debate the text, probably during the autumn term; then there may be a ballot among all the members. Sally Hunt, the union's general secretary, has said she doesn't believe a majority of her members either support the motion or regard the issue as a priority.

Tony Blair, at least, showed somewhat quicker political reflexes: the prime minister immediately telephoned his Israeli counterpart to voice his disapproval and despatched his universities minister, Bill Rammell, to Israel to try limiting the potential damage (amid warnings from Israeli trade unions that they may refuse to unload British goods).

If the British eggheads are taking things at a leisurely pace, the same cannot be said of their opponents, whose reaction was instantaneous and incandescent—especially in the United States. Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard University law professor, has said he is rounding up a team of 100 lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic in order to "devastate and bankrupt" anyone acting against Israeli universities. He predicted that British academia would be "destroyed" if it went ahead with a boycott of Israel, because the countervailing reaction would be so powerful.

That reaction is already gathering pace: more than 2,000 American scholars, including several Nobel Prize winners, have pledge to stay away from any event from which Israelis are excluded. Anthony Julius, a British lawyer and writer on anti-Semitism, has pledged to work with Mr Dershowitz in exposing an initiative which regarded Israel as "uniquely evil" and was reminiscent of medieval bigotry.

That may be overstated. But in Israel many academics, on both left and right, are as mystified as they are enraged. Israel at present has a centre-left government that proposes a two-state solution for the Palestine conflict. The Palestinians have voted into office an Islamist government under the Hamas movement that says it aims to end the existence of the Jewish state by a policy of armed struggle. By general consent, moreover, Israel's universities enjoy far greater academic freedom than any in the Middle East. Why, in these circumstances, should Israeli academics be shunned while those from the other side are welcomed?

Because the vote is perceived as a generalised attack on all Israeli academia, it has also created some embarrassment for Israeli scholars on the political left. Gary Sussman, a social scientist at Tel Aviv University, said that in the new climate created by the vote, charges that the Israeli peace movement is a "fifth column" would have greater credibility. Among supporters of a boycott, there were probably some who wanted to change Israeli policy, and end the occupation of the West Bank, while others were simply against the existence of a Jewish state, Mr Sussman says. The British vote had lent credibility to those who put all external critics of Israel in the second camp.

That is almost certainly true. The Anti-Defamation League, a movement which fights anti-Semitism, has placed some dramatic newspaper advertisements to underline its case that the singling out of Israel by British academia—at a time of terrible misdeeds in Darfur, Zimbabwe and Iran—can only reflect prejudice. Menachem Klein, a political scientist and veteran of Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives, says academic boycotts are not always wrong—but Israel's misdeeds had not merited such a harsh response. The more venerable parts of the British academic establishment seem to agree: there have been condemnations of the UCU vote from the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and Universities UK, which groups all universities' vice-chancellors.

British supporters of a boycott cannot claim that they did not expect the swiftness of the reaction. In April Britain's National Union of Journalists voted in favour of a boycott of Israeli goods, by 66 to 54—as part of a protest against last year's war in Lebanon. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate at the University of Texas, instantly dropped plans to visit London's Imperial College in July, saying it was "hard to find any explanation other than anti-Semitism" for the union's move.

In 2005 the College of Judea and Samaria—especially controversial because it occupies a hilltop in the West Bank settlement of Ariel—was one of the targets of a limited boycott move by Britain's Association of University Teachers, one of two unions which later merged to form the UCU. The Israeli authorities reacted by proposing to upgrade the status of the Ariel campus to a full university—and the British union reversed its decision.

But the British academics who have spearheaded the boycott campaign, citing a moral imperative to support their Palestinian colleagues on the hard-pressed campuses of the West Bank, are defiant. Hilary Rose, who with her husband Steven has been at the heart of the boycott movement for the past five years, sees positive results. One of these, she says, is the objections raised recently by some staff at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to the appointment of a former chief of Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence service, Carmi Gillon: the objectors argued that such appointments would harm the image of Israeli academia at a sensitive time. Also encouraging, from her viewpoint, was the fact a group of Israeli academics were now calling for Palestinian students to have freer access to their universities.

Perhaps the British campaigners and Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian president of Al-Quds University in east Jerusalem, who has opposed academic boycotts, should don their tweed jackets and have a talk. The rights and wrongs look a bit less simple from close up in Jerusalem than from distant British common rooms.