As Britain’s largest university lecturers’ organization considers implementing an academic boycott against Israel, Israeli and Jewish organizations are stepping up efforts to prevent the measure.

The headquarters of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NAFTHE) in London has received thousands of requests in recent weeks to overturn the ruling or postpone its implementation.

The boycott proposal will be reviewed Monday at the organization’s annual conference in Blackpool, England.

The proposal does not encourage a comprehensive measure against Israel, but would only affect those who do not publicly renounce the alleged policies of “apartheid and discrimination in education.”

Israeli academics are organizing efforts to prevent the boycott.

“The idea is mass action” said Prof. Zvi Zigler of Haifa’s Technion, acting head of the Committee for the Protection of Academic Independence.

Zigler said that two weeks ago the committee distributed information to colleges and universities across Britain “urging the separation of science from politics. Someone who has invented a new medication should not be asked whether he supports Abu Mazen.”

Zigler estimates that hundreds of letters were sent by Technion staff alone, and thousands were sent across Israel. NATFHE sources said their office has been “flooded with e-mails.”

The Anti-Defamation League has released a statement condemning the proposal, claiming that “once again, a group of British academics is targeting Israel.”

The ADL collected 12,000 signatures in a petition condemning the boycott as harmful to academic freedom. The petition was sent to the NAFTHE President John Wilkin.

Wilkin also received a petition of 4,725 names from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, an American group devoted to fighting “to develop effective responses to ideological distortions, including anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist slander.”

Another organiztion opposing the boycott is the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom (IAB), established last year at Bar-Ilan University and including 500 academics worldwide.

“Our network is responsible for sending at least 2,500 letters to NAFTHE,” according to Ofir Frankel, a doctoral student at Bar-Ilan.

British newspaper The Guardian published a letter Saturday signed by 600 British academics comparing the boycott to McCarthyism and the anti-Semitic persecution of Communist Eastern Europe.

The letter was written on the initiative of several British organizations, among them Engage, founded in response to a previous boycott of Israel by another lecturers’ organization, the Association of University Teachers (AUT).

The letter expressed the lecturers’ opposition to their colleagues’ “forcing academics to sign a statement to demonstrate political cleanliness.”

In an article on the Guardian’s website, Stephen Rose, professor at the Open University and founder of the British Committee for Universities in Palestine, said that if Israeli universities are indeed innocent of discrimination and of participating with the occupation, they have nothing to worry about.

“If not boycott, what?” Rose said.

“Forty-nine years of hand-wringing and resolutions by the international community have simply prolonged Israeli immunity and the sufferings of the Palestinians.”

After the NAFTHE conference, NAFTHE and AUT are planning to merge. Should the boycott be implemented during the conference, the decision to maintain it would be reviewed at a later date by the new organization