The Fanonite

I have for some time been conflicted about my decision not to join the UCU (or its predecessors). I am generally sceptical of rigidly heirarchical structures, and the leadership of unions generally is notoriously corrupt. The handling of the strike last year was so quite pathetic, and if I were an undergrad, I would have turned against the teachers like so many of them did, despite initial support from the equally ineffectual NUS. No attempt was made to reach out to the students and bring them on board (although I was not associated with any union, when I explained to them the rationales for the strike, I found them invariably sympathetic). The unions pretend to democratic ideals, but in fact remain rigidly top down. So here we have the latest: only months after the excutives of NUJ reversed the wishes of the majority of its member for a boycott of Israeli goods, the UCU’s leadership does the same. But as if this unprincipled action were not enough, it has even cancelled the tour of Palestinian academics who intended to meet their colleagues at campuses around the country to argue for the necessity of a boycott.

In a microcosm, what happened with the NUJ and UCU is symbolic of everything that is wrong with Western style democracy. So long as the opinion of the electorate reflects the interest of the elites, they are allowed a voice. Should it ever come in conflict, as it did in this instance, it can be simply ignored.

Here is the letter sent to the head of UCU Sally Hunt by the President of Federation of Union of Palestinian Universities’ Professors & Employees.

Open Letter to Ms. Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the University and College Union

PFUUPE | | September 29, 2007

Dear Ms. Hunt,
We have received with dismay, although not entirely with surprise, your letter of September 28, 2007 to members of the delegation of Palestinian academic trade union members informing them of the decision by the University and College Union’s leadership to cancel their speaking tour to the UK to discuss the academic boycott of Israel with their colleagues at universities there. We wish to state clearly that we believe that our British colleagues have been deprived of an opportunity to better inform themselves about an issue which is of concern to conscientious academics and intellectuals the world over. Moreover, we are disappointed to see that the leadership of a prominent organization of academics such as yours has not defended the right of its members to engage in debate on this matter. Open debate and discussion are the foundations of academic freedom, and thus we cannot understand why the door to open consideration of controversial ideas has been so abruptly closed.

We shall continue to pursue other avenues to make our case heard in the academic community in the UK, and shall not be deterred by the cancellation of the invitation extended to us by the UCU. While we do not have the resources of the Israel lobby in the UK, we do think that fair-minded British academics will be willing to listen to our case and give it thoughtful consideration. Truth is stronger than power, and we trust in the integrity of British academics to know that instinctively.

We do not think that your members are unaware of the significant role played by the UCU’s predecessor, the AUT, in upholding academics’ commitment to justice. During the struggle against the odious apartheid regime in South Africa, British academics were at the forefront of the academic and other boycotts of the racist state. We do not see why considering ways of fighting Israeli oppression of Palestinians should be subject to different considerations.

We appreciate the sentiments expressed in your letter about “finding a way of opening a dialogue with the Palestinian academic community on building solidarity.” The best form of solidarity with Palestinians, whether they are academics or ordinary people, is direct action aimed at bringing an end to the occupation and the regime of apartheid in Palestine. Isolating Israel in the international arena through various forms of boycott and sanctions and forcing it to obey international law and respect Palestinian rights is one of the strategies open to international civil society, including members of the academy. We are confident that our British colleagues will begin to realize that true solidarity with Palestinian academics requires a political commitment to bringing about an end to oppression and injustice.

Sincerely,
Dr. Amjad Barham
The President of Federation of Union of Palestinian Universities’ Professors & Employees

The decision has also been condemned by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP).

BRICUP (British Committee for the Universities of Palestine) today condemned the decision of the University and College Union (UCU) to cancel the tour of UK campuses by Palestinian academics. UCU was specifically instructed to organise this tour by the UCU Congress last May. The tour was intended to raise debate within the union about an academic boycott of Israeli universities. The UCU leadership under General Secretary Sally Hunt is hiding behind ‘legal advice’ which they have not disclosed to their members in order to sabotage a decision with which they disagree.

In May 2007 in Bournemouth, UCU Annual Congress voted by 158 to 99 in favour of a resolution which instructed the National Executive Committee to

circulate the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches/LAs for information and discussion; encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions;
organise a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academic/educational trade unionists; issue guidance to members on appropriate forms of action.
actively encourage and support branches to create direct links with Palestinian educational institutions and to help set up nationally sponsored programmes for teacher exchanges, sabbatical placements, and research

The UCU senior office holders led by General Secretary Sally Hunt argued fiercely against this motion. The motion’s effect was to initiate a year-long debate about boycotting Israeli universities. Having lost the argument they are now finding other means to subvert the democratic vote of the union’s highest decision-making body.

This use of the law to interfere with democratic freedoms is a deeply worrying tendency – witness the 2005 Serious and Organized Crimes Act preventing protests around Parliament and Downing Street, and the decision last week to ban the march in Central London planned by the Stop the War Coalition.

BRICUP has the deepest doubts about the validity of the ‘legal advice’ which UCU is claiming as the reason for its cancellation of the tour by Palestinians, and the effective banning of discussion of the boycott topic in union branches. BRICUP demands answers to the following questions:

• who provided the legal advice?
• what was the verbatim advice received? It needs to be published so that it can be open to critical scrutiny
• was any previous advice sought from other sources, and if so what was its content?

According to BRICUP co-chair Professor Jonathan Rosenhead “It is all too common for governments and other bodies to go to a lawyer who will give them the advice they want to hear. This is how the then Attorney General Lord Goldsmith got the advice that the invasion of Iraq was ‘legal’”.

Further information: Mike Cushman 07736 705294
www.bricup.org.uk
info@bricup.org.uk

As for how this reversal was brought about, Sharif Elmusa’s article on the Israel lobby’s “Academic Shock and Awe” campaign sheds some important light.

The Israeli emperor now wears only the clothes of apartheid. Many people are noticing and are speaking up. Some have taken steps to boycott this, perhaps the last, apartheid state. The wave includes a wide range of participants, from academic and labour unions to writers, artists, church and student groups and others. Together they speak of boycott, divestment and sanctions. Some of those in the forefront of the campaign are Jewish, including the art critic Peter Berger, Steven Rose at the Open University, and Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who labelled the Israeli system as worse than his country’s former apartheid regime, endorsed divestment. What drew the ire of Israel and the Israel lobby the most, however, is a resolution by the British University and College Union (UCU) at its congress 30 May. The UCU resolution encourages its members to “consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israel academic institutions,” and to forge closer relations with Palestinian universities.

The Israel lobby has reacted to the UCU’s move in Britain with an academic “shock and awe” operation. What I am referring to is the one-page advertisement in The New York Times 8 August, paid for by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The AJC assembled for the ad the signatures of more than 300 American college and university presidents endorsing a statement by Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, that pronounces an identity of interests between US and Israeli universities: “for we do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you [the UCU] are seeking to punish.” It then menacingly takes the logical step: “Add Columbia to the boycott list.” This way the battle is shifted to the enemy’s turf: if you boycott Israeli universities, we will boycott you — a British eye (and a Palestinian one as collateral damage) for an Israeli eye.

The ad places Bollinger’s statement inside a frame at the centre of the page, flanked by presidential names on all sides. The design, together with the first person form Bollinger uses in the statement, intensify the power of the message and give it a sense of urgency. The text is short, terse and declarative. It does not indicate the reasons that led the UCU to pass the resolution after a long and open exchange, making those who backed it sound like extremist airheads. Contestation is the lifeblood of democracy and intellectual advancement, but the big guns do not seem to feel they owe anyone a rational counter-argument. Worse, they do not mention the Palestinians at all; unlike the UCU that frames its resolution in the light of “Israel’s 40-year occupation [which] has seriously damaged the fabric of Palestinian society,” the “denial of educational rights for Palestinians,” and “the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation.” So while the ad is visually framed, it deliberately and callously lacks context. And while it evokes high-minded principles, it takes, behind the reader’s back, the side of the powerful against the wronged. Who then deserves to be called “shoddy intellectually and politically biased,” the UCU, as Bollinger alleges, or he and his colleagues?

The UCU debated the motion over a period of two years. Its resolution in fact was a call for further debate on the boycott, a key point omitted by Bollinger. The union tackled questions like: Why single out Israel when there are so many other bad states in the world? What is the role of Israeli academics in their state’s practices? Does a boycott impinge on the human rights of those subject to the boycott? In contrast, the 300 academic CEOs, like autocratic rulers, have circumvented discussion of the issue on their campuses. That the Israel lobby felt it must respond with such force and without deliberation, in fact, belies moral weakness instead of strength. Like any totalitarian system, the lobby fears that any cracks engendered by free conversation would lead to the crumbling of the edifice of falsehoods it has constructed about Israel and the Palestinians. Rigid structures collapse suddenly.

At stake for the academy is not just the question of the boycott; it is also matter of who has “voice”. Organised British educators are saying that they, too, not just the heads of their institutions, can take initiative in shaping relations with others. They, not the heads, after all are the teachers, trainers, researchers and collaborators. Will members of faculty and students at American universities — even those opposed to the boycott — demand that the issue be tabled for deliberation and that all concerned get a chance to freely express their opinion? Or will they accept the decree of their presidents in silence?

British academics that objected to the resolution felt at least obligated to express, in a message to the UCU, their sympathy with the Palestinian plight and the chronic stranglehold Israel has over their educational development. It is doubtful that many of the signatories of the US ad are even aware of this dark side of Israel’s conduct. How much does, for example, Susan Hockfield, president of MIT, my alma mater, and a neuroscientist, know about the issue? Shouldn’t she have consulted, before signing such an important policy position, members of her own faculty, among them Noam Chomsky? Had she talked to him or other region scholars she would have learned a great deal about Israel’s systematic dispossession of the Palestinians; about the numerous and extended closures of Palestinian universities; about the thousands of students who were imprisoned and banished into exile; about the ban in the last couple of years against academics with dual nationalities from entering into the West Bank and Gaza to resume teaching. She could have been informed of this, and much more. Fortunately, it is not too late for Hockfield to educate herself. She can venture into the West Bank and Gaza and discover the truth first hand. If pressed for time, she can visit websites such as those of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel ( www.pacbi.org ) and the UCU ( www.ucu.org.uk ).

Still, lack of knowledge alone does not sufficiently explain the mobilisation of 300 academic presidents. Bollinger himself must understand something about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He handled several fabricated charges by pro-Israeli media and activists against Palestinian and other Arab professors at Columbia, including the late Edward Said, Joseph Massad and George Saliba. We can only conclude, especially since the cost of the ad was defrayed by the AJC, that Bollinger and at least some of his colleagues fell under the influence of the Israeli lobby. In The London Review of Books, Spring 2007, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt — who have written a book on the lobby due for release this month — cite the testimony of several highly knowledgeable Washingtonians on the lobby’s reach. One of them, former Senator Ernest Hollings, said on leaving office that “you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC (the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby group in Washington) gives you around here.” Could the 300 presidents forge no other policy on the UCU’s resolution other than what American Jewish lobbyists dictate to them?

Their stance carries a moral burden. By siding with power, and by trying to abort the boycott effort, they abet in depriving the Palestinians of the only viable non- violent course of resistance to the Israeli occupation of their land. The international boycott of white South Africa’s apartheid system eventually led to the collapse of that system. Equally salient, but often forgotten, is that the boycott strengthened the hand of Nelson Mandela and others in the African National Congress who advocated peaceful means for achieving majority rule. Otherwise, there would have been much more bloodshed, and perhaps no reconciliation between blacks and whites. The US government was one of the very last to join the boycott against South Africa, after a prolonged pursuit of hypocritical “constructive engagement”. (Israel never joined and maintained its strong historic links with apartheid South Africa.) When the boycott took hold, however, American academics and others were rightly proud to take part and to engage in civil disobedience in front of South Africa’s diplomatic missions and offices. What is the difference between South Africa and Israel? The Israel lobby? Perhaps. But in the end, Bollinger and his peers must accept responsibility for their unilateral, politically biased attempt to pre-empt debate. The start of the new academic year is a good time for concerned faculty and students to demand a voice.

* The writer is an associate professor of political science at the American University in Cairo.