http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/973991.html

Senior academics and officials in the British Jewish community are gearing up for another boycott motion in their country against Israeli academia but lament they’ve lost a valuable resource which could lead the battle against well-funded proponents of the boycott. Though the motion may not have practical implications, leaders are concerned they may lose ground on the PR front because the Israeli academic body that led last year’s anti-boycott campaign, the Advisory Board for Academic Freedom (IAB), closed down for lack of funding.

The British academic union, the University and College Union (UCU), is planning to hold a conference next month in Manchester where it will consider the renewed call for a boycott. The UCU’s attempt last year to propose a similar motion was shot down by the union’s legal team, which at the time said that the motion was “unlawful and cannot be implemented.”

This year’s motion notes the “continuation of illegal settlement, killing of civilians and the impossibility of civil life, including education” in the Palestinian territories, as well as what it calls the “apparent complicity of the Israeli academy.” It proposes a twinning with Palestinian university as an act of solidarity, singles out Ariel College in the West Bank for further investigation, and urges “wide discussion by colleagues of the appropriateness of continued education links with Israeli academic institutions.” The word boycott is not mentioned in the UCU text.

Put on edge

Despite last year’s precedent, however, Israeli academics in the U.K. are on edge and say the lack of funding for groups like IAB has negative implications at a critical time when cooperation is needed more than ever. “I’ve tried to bring Israeli lecturers [to the U.K.] and organize academic exchanges, but without funding, it has been problematic,” said Prof. David Newman, a British-born lecturer at Ben Gurion University, who is now on sabbatical at the University of London. He claimed Palestinian supporters hold conferences on U.K. campuses every week “about Israel as an apartheid state.” Newman complained, “There needs to be a greater balance, but my hands are tied because I have no budget.”

Young British academics, he says, rely on the UCU or simply absorb what is going on around them in campus politics. “This lack of knowledge about Israeli academics and Israeli universities is a major factor,” he said. “But without funding, I cannot arrange workshops, seminars and conferences in the U.K. for Israeli academics or vice versa. The small, hard core group that wants to see this (boycott) go through has bigger funding behind them. They are not just a small group of academics, but we haven’t been able to unravel where their funding is coming from.”

The IAB, established at Bar Ilan University in 2005, was forced to close its operations in December. It was the only inter-university Israeli academic body that waged an organized battle against boycott attempts.

Before the IAB’s founding, “we needed to call at least seven different institutions just to get basic information,” observed Jeremy Newmark, head of the Jewish Leadership Council in the U.K. and coordinator of the Stop the Boycott Coalition. “The IAB became a coordinating vehicle for Israeli academia and a very effective single point of contact. This new situation creates complications and difficulties, especially when fighting this potentially resurgent boycott.” Newmark says the community plans to support UCU members who oppose the boycott, as well as hire lawyers to provide opinions on the legal implications of such a move. “There are a growing number of members within the UCU who don’t want political extremists to hijack their union and don’t want it to break anti-discrimination laws,” he says.

‘Ties are strong’

Education Minister Yuli Tamir is less concerned with the boycott effort. She told Anglo File in an interview this week that despite what she believes to be a temporary closure of the IAB, the boycott issue is less pressing than in years past simply because both the British government and the country’s mainstream academic establishment remain firmly committed to open academic ties with Israel.

“The ties between academics in Israel and England are very strong – there hasn’t been a decrease in cooperation between the two countries and if anything, there has been an increase,” she said. “The heads of the major universities have all visited Israel. The UCU is trying again (to raise the boycott issue), but they haven’t been able to convince the established British academia.” The boycott motion, she added, is disruptive- but has no practical implications. “The boycott only bothers us because of its incitement against Israel,” Tamir said.

The Israel Advisory Board boasts an estimated 10,000 members, including many academics outside of Israel. Beginning in 2008, however, the body ceased to continue functioning. VERA, Israel’s committee of university presidents, originally promised to fund half the group’s budget, while the Israel Council of Higher Education’s budget and planning committee said it would match VERA’s funding. But none of the money has come through. “It got to the point where I was paying for IAB work out of my own pocket,” Ofir Frankel, executive director of the now-stalled IAB, said this week. “By December (2007), I was in debt and had no choice but to close. We received all of the promises in the world the budget would come through any minute, but we never saw it. They kept saying next week, next week, and next week, but every week, it’s a different excuse.”

VERA spokesperson Dgania Cohen said her organization was reviewing the issue. Prof. Rivka Carmi, president of Ben Gurion University and a member of the committee, says she expects the funding to come through “within a week or two.” The British Jewish community, meanwhile, is on high alert ahead of the meeting next month and charges Israeli academia’s inability to fund the IAB is “dismaying.”

Israel’s ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, meanwhile called Israeli academia’s decision to not fund IAB an issue of “great concern.” Despite the government’s efforts, he said “it is indisputable that the key role in this remains with Israeli academia.” He said, “It is vital that an all-university representative body exists in order to lead the public campaign to counter the calls for academic boycott that the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) in the UK is attempting to impose once again on Israel.

“Until recently, the IAB played this role. It is important that this or a similar body continues with this task, involving all academic institutions in Israel. Israeli academia cannot simply stand idly by and rely on the success of its scientific cooperation projects. The image of Israeli academia is inextricably linked to the image of Israel, and calls for an academic boycott erode the images of both.”