Britain’s University and College Union, a labor union representing 130,000 academics, is supporting a call for a boycott of Israel i universities. Perhaps it is time for American academics to act against this expression of anti-Semitism by their British counterparts. A Nobel laureate at the University of Texas has provided a good example with a solo boycott of a British university.

The 158-99 vote by the union’s national convention appears not to mean any concrete action unless a local chapter votes it. But the resolution was bad enough, condemning what it said was “the complicity of Israeli academia” in the occupation of territories conquered in 1967. This is laughably contrary to the facts – several Israeli university presidents have just called on the government to ease travel restrictions on Palestinian students and the universities house their share of doves in Israel’s politics.

Britain’s National Union of Journalists in April voted a different sort of boycott, of Israeli products, and the nation’s largest union, Unison, has a boycott resolution on its conference agenda for June 19. Israel is the only country in the world thus singled out. Leave aside repellent small regimes like Zimbabwe without much in the way of trade or academic institutions: Where are the boycotts of Chinese universities over the treatment of Tibet, or of Catholics? Boycotts of Turkish products over the treatment of Kurds? Of Russia over Chechnya? Of Iran over the oppression of all sorts of minorities?

After the journalists’ boycott was announced, professor Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas cancelled a visit to Imperial College, London, for a symposium in honor of the late Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam. This was not just another conference for Weinberg; he and Salam split two-thirds of the 1979 physics prize for their work in showing that electromagnetism and a certain kind of radioactivity were manifestations of the same fundamental force.

Weinberg wrote that “given the history of the attacks on Israel and the oppressiveness and aggressiveness of other countries in the Middle East, boycotting Israel indicated a moral blindness for which it is hard to find any explanation other than anti-Semitism.” Weinberg specifically declined to recommend a boycott to others. But his example is now out there, a challenge to his colleagues and perhaps an inspiration.