Israel’s News Blog Magazine: Daily Stories Video and PhotosThe British paper “The Guardian” published yesterday a letter written by four British academics writing in the name of six hundred Academy people from all around the world, calling the NATFHE (National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education) to not boycott Israeli academics. This comes as a response to a Palestinian initiative to make British scholars boycott Israel “Due to the occupation and its Apartheid policies”.
Another academic organization, AUT (Association of University Teachers) has already declined the Palestinian initiative. Now the four British scholars want the NATFHE to do the same.
According to “The Guardian”, thousands of academy people have already sign the petition that was published on the Internet against the boycott. The petition was publish by the “Academic Higher Council for Freedom of Academic Teaching” which was founded in Bar-Ilan University, and has about five hundred people for twenty different countries as members. The petition says amongst other things that a boycott “Will weakened the bridge that lead to the end of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians”.
The letter in the Guardian was written by Derek Meyer from University of Westminster, Leslie Bash from Anglia Ruskin University, Paul Langston from Aylesbury College and Stephen Soskin from Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College.
The four say that the initiative is discriminating to Israel and writes, “Unions should have consistent policy with regard to human rights abuses and the curtailment of academic freedom that goes with them. We oppose the inconsistency of blacklisting Israelis, but adopting a different attitude to academics in the US, China, Russia, Britain, Sudan, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Syria or Egypt - or in the long list of other states that are responsible for equal or worse human rights abuses”.
They also mention that, “Israeli universities are among the most open and anti-racist spaces in Israel. They have large numbers of Arab students and teachers. The Oslo peace process was forged by links between Israeli and Palestinian academics”.
NATFHE is supposed to make a decision in the days ahead.
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The letter was not written by the four academics named in the Guardian with the letter here. It was written by two activists of the anti-occupation group Trotskyist-oriented UK group Engage, and they present it as by “603 anti-occupation academics” on their web site.
The union of academics in the UK prestigious universities, AUT, has not ruled out a further boycott initiative. In fact they have passed a policy which allows a boycott to be agreed in response to a “call” from “representative groups” in “occupied territories”.
The two unions are due to be merged next week.
I’ve covered the back stories here and here.
NATFHE has a long standing track record of adopting hard line far left policies and is affiliated to the UK’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign. It is dominated by Trotskyist groups who are totally unrepresentative of its membership.
*Sigh*
Such a shame some things never change. It was like that when i was ensconced in British academia, and that was nearly twenty years ago.
(Ulp!)
Judy is absolutely right about the unrepresentative domination of Trots over the membership. Unfortunately it is the tiny yet loud minority who dominate and make their mark.
*Sigh*. Again.
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