Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

As I had said earlier, the effectiveness of boycott as a tactic is clear from the reaction it has generated. More news on the panic caused in Israel and among its apologists by the UCU boycott.

Friends in High Places

Tony Blair phoned the Israeli prime minister to reassure him that the motion did not reflect wider public opinion. In Israel, MPs began drafting a bill to label British imports – allowing consumers to stage their own counter boycott.

But in the two weeks since the vote, it is the US that has had the biggest surge of activity among the anti-boycott camp. About 2,000 American scholars – including at least nine Nobel laureates - have vowed to stay away from any event from which Israelis are excluded. A Democrat from suburban Philadelphia, Patrick Murphy, has moved a resolution in the House of Representatives, condemning the vote and calling on members of the UCU to reject the boycott…

[The 'nine Nobel laureates' I presume include the four who put blurbs on Joan Peters hoax From Time Immemorial, and the bigot who called Palestinians 'primitives'.]

In Israel, commentators have been reduced to weighing options such as,

How to react to the so-called British boycott against Israel? This is a question asked by many players in the Jewish world after the University and College Union, Britain’s largest teachers union, voted to consider an academic boycott of Israeli universities. How can one take revenge against a body on which one has no influence? And, even if it was possible, would revenge make British academia more reluctant to boycott Israel, or rather more prone to spite criticism and stay the course?…

Exposing the hypocrisy and the irrationality of the boycott is easy. The Anti Defamation League is offering an ad campaign on its web site doing just that. Will that change the decision? Such ads can only work against people who have shame, and I don?t think many such people can be found in the body that voted for the boycott.

[Indeed. A man enjoying the benefits of a genocidal establishment is just the one to speak about shame]

Official Israel is playing its part this week by forming a new committee, announced yesterday, to fight the boycott. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Education Minister Yuli Tamir said such precedents should not be ignored. Those promoting this measure, Livni said, should know that it will have “a price”…

But what is it exactly that Israel can do?

Israel’s Trade and Industry Minister Eli Yishai threatened to mark all British products. That’s nice, but will probably result in the marking of Israeli products in Britain. And what about a counter academic boycott? The truth is that Israelis are terrified by the prospect of such a showdown. ‘A counter [academic] boycott is a mistake,’ said Tamir in the Knesset Monday. Professors weren?t enthusiastic either. “Let’s face it”, one said, “we need them more than they need us”…

One such U.S. academician already reacted to the boycott two weeks ago. Nobel Prize winner Prof. Steven Weinberg [M.I.A: Yep, that is the bigot] decided not to travel to Britain this summer. If other notables will follow his example, if foundations will eliminate British institutions from their grants? lists, if lawyers will sue, and legislators will keep up the pressure, it might help. It might also give those British academicians yet another reason with which to justify their ugly anti-Semitism.

PR Offensive 

Meanwhile in Israel,

The foreign and education ministers are setting up a public relations task force to prepare a public relations campaign against the boycotts of Israel being forged in the United Kingdom.

The joint task force will consist of representatives of the two ministries, the Histadrut and heads of universities and colleges…

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said in a debate on the task force yesterday that “we’re dealing with hypocrisy and hatred, which must not be allowed to emerge, even if they are marginal bodies. Whoever promotes such a boycott must understand that it has a price.”

Foreign Ministry deputy director general for Europe Rafi Barak will head the task force, which has been instructed to recommend ways of dealing with the situation in Britain both politically and through public relations.

Emphasis will be placed on working through the Internet and cooperating with voluntary bodies such as the friendship associations, the Jewish community, churches, trade unions, etc.

And in the US,

Alan Dershowitz, the prominent lawyer and Harvard law professor, says he has mustered a team of 100 high-profile lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic to “devastate and bankrupt” anyone acting against Israeli universities.

[Yes, that is Alan Dershowitz, the man who plagiarized from the aforementioned Joan Peters hoax]

“If the union goes ahead with this immoral petition, it will destroy British academia,” Dershowitz told the Guardian last night. “We will isolate them from the rest of the world…”

Dershie would do well to restrain his academia destroying threats to where they have a chance of succeeding. He may have helped ‘destroy’ Norman Finkelstein’s academic career, he hasn’t silenced him, and he can’t do jack here.

Sue Blackwell, who spoke in favour of the motion, said it was outrageous that a democratic vote to discuss a boycott had provoked such a virulent response. “The fact that so many people outside the union do not like the idea of a us taking a democratic decision to have a debate about this issue is quite incredible,” she said. “We have voted to discuss how best to help our Palestinian brothers and sisters who often are not allowed to get to college or university and that is what we will do whatever the threats and intimidation that come our way.”

In the US, moves to censure Israel by students on American campuses have been met with much stronger, well-organised opposition. Campaigns for universities to divest from firms that sell arms and equipment to the Israeli army have been strenuously resisted. Only one governing body – at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville – has issued such a call. “The political climate here is a lot different than Britain. It’s difficult in the States even to get a discussion going about boycotts,” said Mohammed Abed, a philosophy student who was active in the divestment campaign.

The Bigot and Plagiarist

Many in the anti-boycott camp see the UCU’s stance as part of a wider trend of attacks on Israel, pointing to recent boycott proposals from the NUJ, Unison and some British doctors. Julius said Israel was being treated as “uniquely evil” in a way he said was reminiscent of the anti-semitism of the medieval Christian church. “I sometimes think that Jews born in the 1940s and 1950s have been living through a golden period but that the closed season on Jews has now come to an end.” He is drawing up a paper with Dershowitz outlining what he claims are the moral weaknesses of the boycott proposal and explaining how it would infringe on academic freedom.

Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics at the University of Texas [and a renowned bigot], who cancelled a visit to the UK after NUJ boycott calls this year, told the Guardian the UCU stance was anti-semitic. “I am not saying that every criticism of the state of Israel is necessarily anti-semitic, but this kind of moral condemnation is, it seems to me, when there is nothing to condemn.”

But this argument is dismissed by supporters. “It is offensive and is beginning to wear very thin indeed,” said Blackwell. “This is explicitly a debate about the policies of the Israeli government and role of Israeli universities and the fact that many Jewish people in this country support a boycott shows that it has nothing to do with anti-semitism.”

In Israel, the UCU’s position has triggered a wave of criticism. Some have threatened a retaliatory boycott of British products and union workers have said they may refuse to unload British imports. Many have repeated the accusation that there is a seam of anti-semitism just below the surface of the boycott debate. “Boycotting a product because it’s made in Israel resembles, in my opinion, hanging a sign on the store that reads ‘Jew’,” Otniel Schneller, the Kadima MP who has proposed the bill, told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper this week. “The fact that we tend to take it and to apologise weakens us.”

They Work For You?

Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, will travel to Israel tomorrow to meet Israeli ministers and the heads of several Israeli universities to discuss the boycott. He has already said he was “very disappointed” at the UCU vote.

Israel’s leading trade union federation, Histadrut, is hoping to send delegates to the Unison conference this month. “We believe in solidarity and in dialogue and not in a one-sided attitude,” said Avital Shapiro-Shabirow, director of international activity for Histadrut.

For those who don’t know Histadrut’s history, it is the Israeli trade union movement that assisted in the disposession of the Palestinians (as documented in Zachary Lockman’s excellent book) and during the 80s, it aided the Israeli state in shipping arms to death squads in Central America under supplies of watermelons, and assisted the Apartheid regime in its wars in Mozambique and Angola. Onwards.

Among some Palestinians the view is different. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel says boycotts are legitimate efforts to end the occupation. Pro-boycott Palestinian academics are expected to tour UK universities in coming months.

Origins of the Boycott Campaign

Steven Rose, professor of biology at the Open University, started the boycott campaign with a letter to the Guardian in 2002 arguing for a moratorium on European funding of Israeli research.

However, it was not until 2005 that the Association of University Teachers – the predecessor to the University and College Union – voted to cut links with Haifa and Bar Ilan universities, which it claimed were complicit in the abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Steven and Hillary Rose. They are not just exceptional human beings, they are also scholars of the highest order.