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Professor Shereen Benjamin, lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and prime force behind the AUT boycott, accused Israel of being a "colonial apartheid state, more insidious than South Africa".
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UK's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: "The AUT has betrayed the academic principles it supposedly represents."
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| By israelinsider staff and partners April 25, 2005 |
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Britain's Association of University Teachers (AUT) have decided to boycott Israel's Bar Ilan and Haifa Universities.
The Council of the AUT -- a trade union and professional association for over 48,700 UK higher education professionals -- unanimously passed the two motions to boycott the institutions of higher learning at an executive union meeting held on the eve of Passover, evidently to deliberately exclude its Jewish members.
The orations of Sue Blackwell and Shereen Benjamin, both lecturers at Birmingham University, went unanswered by the academics in attendance. Both labeled Israel as a "colonial apartheid state, more insidious than South Africa," called for the "removal of this regime," and tried to depict Israeli universities as "repressing" academic freedom.
The AUT council voted to boycott Bar-Ilan because it runs courses at colleges in the West Bank town of Ariel and "is thus directly involved with the occupation of Palestinian territories contrary to United Nations resolutions".
It decided to boycott Haifa because the university disciplined a lecturer for supporting a student who misrepresented attacks on Palestinians during the founding of the state of Israel.
AUT General Secretary Sally Hunt, who announced the boycott, asked members to avoid all academic and cultural cooperation with the two universities.
Council delegates also called for a boycott of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, after claims that the institution had confiscated land occupied by Palestinian families in east Jerusalem, and agreed to circulate to all local associations a statement from Palestinian organisations calling for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions.
When asked why she wished to boycott Israeli institutions, Ms. Blackwell told The Jerusalem Post that she was responding to a call made by Palestinian organizations, among them a trade union, to "show solidarity with the Palestinian people and to draw attention to the way Israeli universities were complicit in the occupation."
In her allegations against the Israeli institutions, Ms. Blackwell -- who before the session stood outside of the conference center, draped in a Palestine flag and surrounded by kaffiya-clad activists from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who handed out leaflets branding Zionism as a "racist ideology," and accusing Israel of "ethnic cleansing" -- referred to a letter by Ilan Pappe, lecturer in political science at Haifa University. A message from Dr. Pappe was distributed to every executive member at the conference, in which Pappe called on the conference to adopt a boycott of his own university, and alleged he was the victim of "restriction" and "harassment."
Her speech was met with rapturous applause from the audience, before AUT executive president Angela Roger cut short the session and moved to deny a right of reply to opponents of the motions. The session was then directed towards a vote, and a "lack of time" was cited as the reason preventing challenges to the motions from being heard.
There was no opportunity for academics who had planned on opposing the motions.
Executive member Alistair Hunter, to address the conference. Dr. Hunter described the AUT's endorsement of a boycott against Israeli universities as an "ill judged decision" and expressed disgust at the absence of debate before voting commenced.
The Israeli embassy in London released a statement criticizing "the fact that no AUT member who wanted to argue against this decision was allowed to speak," and described the motions as "perverse in their content."
In a conversation following the vote, even the AUT's Assistant General Secretary, David Bleiman remarked to Shereen Benjamin that the motion would "carry little moral authority," as there had been "no debate."
The boycott motions prompted the immediate resignation of two Jewish academics from the AUT. Jonathan Ginzburg and Shalom Lappin, professors at King's College London, wrote in an open letter: "We feel that we have no choice but to resign from the AUT immediately, and we call upon our colleagues to do the same. We also appeal to the administrations of British universities and to other labor unions, at home and abroad, to withdraw recognition from the AUT until it rescinds this motion."
Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks expressed his disappointment in the AUT's decision.
"I am most distressed by this outcome. Academic life is about building bridges of dialogue, not destroying them; opening minds, not closing them; hearing both sides of an argument, not one alone. The AUT has betrayed the academic principles it supposedly represents. This is a sad day for British universities," the rabbi concluded.
Ronnie Fraser, chair of the Academic Friends of Israel group, said: "The union effectively asked its membership to break its own laws on racism and discrimination."
Israeli Deputy Ambassador to the U.K. Zvi Ravner told The Guardian he is surprised and concerned regarding the decision by leading academic institutions in Britain to impose an academic boycott on Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities. "The last time Jews had been boycotted in universities was in 1930's Germany," he said.
Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman said in response "Those who now urge a boycott of Israeli universities must know that such a boycott is an assault on the very idea of the university as a citadel of intellectual freedom and informed debate."
Israel's Foreign Ministry said the union was guilty of hypocrisy.
"The fact that AUT chose to target Israel, the only country in the Middle East that has complete academic freedom for all segments of the population and all political streams is scandalous," the ministry said in a statement.
The ministry singled out countries such as Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia for suppressing academic freedom. The statement urged British academics to distance themselves from the boycott.
British university administrators and Jewish student groups were outraged.
"It is a betrayal of academic principles -- it looks like they are moving backwards into the hatred of the past few years," said Union of Jewish Students spokesman Danny Stone.
Universities U.K., representing university executives, called the union's resolution "inimical to academic freedom, including the freedom of academics to collaborate with other academics."
Plans to launch an international boycott of the union are currently being discussed by Jewish academics in Britain.
Yaakov Lappin, Talya Halkin, Sari Cohen, and the AP contributed to this report.
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