Trans-Atlantic Rift

British academics' threat to boycott Israel perplexes American colleagues

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By AISHA LABI

Last May delegates to the inaugural annual conference of the University and College Union, which represents 120,000 British academics, stoked international controversy by voting to consider a boycott of Israeli institutions and academics. The move was the latest attempt by British faculty unions in recent years to penalize Israeli universities. And, like previous efforts, it has angered and puzzled many academics in the United States.

Americans and Britons have long enjoyed a "special relationship," as it is called, in the professorial as well as the political arena. But no issue has created as gaping a trans-Atlantic gulf between academics as the Israeli-Palestinian question.

The boycott motion that passed — by a vote of 158 to 99, with 17 abstentions — condemned "the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation." It instructed the union's national executive committee to circulate the text of a boycott call from Palestinian trade unions for "information and discussion" among the British union's local branches, and to "encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions." It also called for the committee to organize a tour of British campuses by Palestinian academics and trade-union representatives.

The vote set in motion a potentially drawn-out process, but its reverberations were immediate. Sally Hunt, the union's general secretary, issued a statement saying that she did not believe most members supported a boycott. (Ms. Hunt did not return numerous calls seeking further comment.)

Britain's higher-education minister quickly scheduled a trip to Israel as a show of solidarity. And a committee of the American Association of University Professors expressed its concern in a statement condemning academic boycotts.

The president of Columbia University said he was "profoundly disturbed" by the union's action. "In seeking to quarantine Israeli universities and scholars, this vote threatens every university committed to fostering scholarly and cultural exchanges," Lee C. Bollinger wrote. If the boycott proceeds, he added, the British union should add Columbia to its list of sanctioned institutions. New York University and other American institutions have joined the chorus of condemnation as well.

Anti-Semitic?

Some American academics, like the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, say they see the boycott vote and similar proposals by British academic unions in recent years as evidence of growing anti-Semitism.

Mr. Weinberg canceled a recent trip to Britain, saying he no longer feels comfortable visiting the country. A British-government report published in April bolstered that view, saying there is reason for concern about a "rising tide of anti-Semitic discourse and anti-Semitism on university campuses."

But Shalom Lappin, a professor of computational linguistics at King's College, in London, who grew up in Canada and is an Israeli citizen, says British academics' receptiveness to boycotts cannot be explained away as simple anti-Semitism.

Rather, he thinks, the boycott motions result from views of freedom of speech and academic freedom that are fundamentally different from those in the United States.

"The notion of a boycott as a violation of individual rights and academic freedom is obvious to any North American," says Mr. Lappin, arguing that British scholars do not see freedom of speech and academic freedom as absolute values.

Mr. Lappin, although he is a longtime critic of the Israeli government's policies, resigned his membership in the new union over the recent vote, just as in 2005 he quit the Association of University Teachers over its decision to boycott two Israeli universities for allegedly undermining Palestinian rights and academic freedom. (That boycott was overturned at a specially convened meeting a month later.)

Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the British news media has also skewed the views of British academics, says Mr. Lappin.

"The press and opinion-manufacturing classes here have an absolute obsession with the Palestinian conflict as a linchpin for understanding the world," says the professor. The dominant depiction is of the Palestinians as powerless victims of disproportionate Israeli aggression. "The issue isn't criticism of the occupation, which is not only praiseworthy but essential," he says, "but the fact that the Palestinians have been homogenized into a non-agentized mass of victims."

Only in the Israeli context, he says, does criticism of a government's actions extend so

broadly to the rest of society, leading to the

urge to punish academics and other citizens for their government's sins. The virulent anti-Israel sentiment that underpins those impulses is a kind of anti-Semitism, he argues.

Proxy for American Policy?

Supporters of the proposed boycott, many themselves Jewish, dismiss those explanations.

Steven Rose, an emeritus professor of biology at the Open University and secretary of the British Committee for Universities of Palestine, comes from a family of Holocaust survivors. It is "profoundly wrong," he says, to view the boycott push as evidence of anti-Semitism, which, he adds, he has spent much of his own career battling.

Much of the reaction to the union's vote misconstrued the content of the motion, says Mr. Rose: Delegates voted simply to begin a democratic process of debate and discussion, and no boycott decision will be taken until that process has occurred. He is baffled by the gap between the content of the motion and the way the vote has been portrayed, and cites what he says is the tendency of many supporters of Israeli policy "to scream defamation and to heap abuse on anyone who actually criticizes Israel."

Some critics of the boycott movement have invoked Israel's relationship with the United States to explain why leftist British academics are so keen to criticize the Jewish state, which they see as a proxy for American international policy. Mr. Rose agrees that Israeli-American ties help explain why American academics often respond differently to Israel than their British counterparts do.

The political climate in the United States, he says, has produced a view "of Israel right or wrong, which has blocked any attempt to hold Israel to account."

The fault lines are not only national, of course, and many academics in Britain have matched the fervor of some in America in their opposition to the boycott effort, although Mr. Lappin says there has been a worrisome lack of leadership from the British academic establishment on that front.

"They will make general statements about academic freedom" but are afraid to take the "radioactive" step of making a stronger show of support for Israeli institutions, he says. Oxford dons, taking matters into their own hands, voted overwhelmingly in June for a resolution noting their opposition to academic boycotts as a matter of principle and calling for a unionwide ballot on the boycott issue.

If a referendum is called and the boycott motion is rejected, as is widely expected would be the case, boycott supporters will no doubt revisit the issue, demonstrating another factor behind the apparent popularity of such measures in Britain.

British academics are not necessarily more concerned with events in Israel than their American peers are, but British union politics have tended to be dominated by left-wing activists inclined to focus on overtly political causes. That emphasis has led to the formation of what may be the largest academic union in the world, but one that, for now, seems out of step with its counterparts across the Atlantic.