There could hardly be a motion more inimical to the purposes and ethos of a university than the call for an academic boycott of Israel, tabled at the inaugural conference of the University and College Union. Britain’s largest trade union for academics is to circulate a call to “consider the moral implication of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions”. If adopted, this will stop UCU members attending conferences in Israel or writing for Israeli journals. Yesterday Tony Blair told Parliament that the move would not help the peace process or relations in the Middle East. That is an extraordinary understatement. The move is a mockery of academic freedom, a biased and blinkered call that is as ill-timed as it is perverse.Links between universities are often the only lines of communication open between countries when all else is obstructed. They keep alive the hope of dialogue even in nations deaf to the outside world. They appeal directly to the moral and intellectual elites who constitute the conscience of a nation. Even during the horrors of Stalinism, the universities of Cambridge and Manchester maintained links with Soviet physicists and scientists. During apartheid, the liberal conscience of South Africa was kept alive by the brave staff of its universities. And amid the despair that is Zimbabwe today, the universities, still maintaining former Commonwealth links, are able to offer the moral support of the interrnational community.
Israel is not deaf to world opinion, nor is there any threat to academic freedom. Its policies towards the Palestinians, however, may have evoked strong opposition among many academics and students in Europe. But nowhere in Israel are peace activists more strongly represented than in its universities and colleges. Such a boycott is tokenism of the worst kind – a meaningless gesture that sends a “message” to politically correct union members but does nothing to advance the cause that they purport to uphold: the freedom of all peoples in the region to live and study in freedom and dignity.
Had the UCU taken the trouble to look at the record, they would have found that, far from condoning the aggression, as the motion naively maintains, Israeli universities have, on the whole, done much to mitigate the effects. They have opened their doors to Arab students and given both sides opportunities to discuss the roots of their mutual animosities. Only this week the presidents of four prestigious institutions, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion and Haifa universities and the Technion technology institute, called on the Israeli Defence Minister to lift the sweeping travel ban between the West Bank and Gaza so that Palestinian students could pursue their education. Israel, they said, should be a state that “supports the principle of academic freedom and the right to education”.
The UCU call for a boycott comes two years after the Association of University Teachers approved a similar move that was later overturned. The AUT was one of the unions that merged to form the UCU – which appears to have learnt nothing from the earlier outcry at this arbitrary, misguided and discriminatory proposal. Instead, the UCU should do all it can to cultivate every contact available with Israeli universities. The academics calling for the boycott have much to learn.