(Buffalo, NY, April 14, 2009) Faculty members in the State University of New York system are circulating a union resolution to denounce an Ontario academic union’s boycott of Israel. SUNY faculty and professional staff are represented by United University Professions (UUP), which is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.

The SUNY faculty are responding to the move by the Ontario Branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees in February 2009 to boycott Israeli institutions including universities.

The proposed SUNY resolution denounces the Ontario union, asks its leadership to resign, and calls for “open, civilized, and intellectually informed debate, open to all standpoints, about Middle East conflicts and human rights abuses, and about the role of global scapegoating in masking brutal war and repression around the world.”

SUNY at Buffalo Professor Ernest Sternberg, who serves on the Board of Directors of SPME and chairs his campus’s SPME Chapter, is spearheading the effort. According to Sternberg, the Ontario union’s action “is triply repugnant. It violates the principle of free academic exchange. It falsely accuses Israel of crimes while omitting the context of terrorism and war within which Israel must survive. And it scapegoats Israel while ignoring brutal human rights violations and genocides around the world.”

Sternberg is asking SUNY faculty members to urge UUP to formally adopt the resolution through the local union Chapter Board and, more importantly, through statewide union bodies. These statewide bodies consist of the UUP Delegate Assembly, which next meets in Albany on April 24-25; and the UUP Executive Board, which will meet in April and again on June 19 in Albany. Sternberg asks SUNY faculty members to email and phone their local delegates to their union bodies. Sternberg can be reached at ezs@buffalo.edu.

The proposed resolution follows below.

Proposed:

UUP Denounces CUPE-Ontario Boycott of Israeli Institutions

Resolution prepared for submission to United University Professions

Local chapters, Delegate Assembly, and state Executive Committee

Version of April 14, 2009

1. WHEREAS on February 22, 2009, the Ontario branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE-Ontario) voted to support boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli institutions, including universities and, as explained on the union’s question and answer webpage (updated Feb. 24, 3009) that the vote was “The call for a boycott of academic institutions is part of a broader campaign of Israeli boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) that CUPE Ontario has already approved in 2006.”

2. WHEREAS in so doing CUPE-Ontario is allying itself with an international anti-Israel movement led by Iran, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Cuba and other human-rights abusing regimes;

3. WHEREAS CUPE-Ontario, in citing the recent Gaza war as a reason for its action, prejudicially fails to state that the Hamas regime, which controls Gaza, has fired more than 6,000 rockets at Israeli civilians, and is therefore engaged in warfare against the government and people of Israel under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter;

4. WHEREAS CUPE-Ontario prejudicially erases the context for the Gaza war: Hamas sanctioned terrorism against Israelis, the Iranian-Hizbullah-Hamas official and media-conveyed genocide incitement and Holocaust denial, the Hamas indoctrination of children into genocidal hatred of Jews and Israelis, and Hamas’s explicit calls in its charter for the military destruction of Israel and the elimination of Jews from the Middle East;

5. WHEREAS CUPE-Ontario fails to mention Israeli efforts in the recent Gaza war to select targets sheltering Hamas personnel and weapons and omits Hamas’s violations of international law in positioning terrorists, military personnel, missile launches, and weapons in hospitals, schools, mosques, and a university, and Hamas’s documented use of human shields, in order to launch indiscriminate attacks against Israel civilian targets;

6. WHEREAS CUPE-Ontario fails to mention Israel’s effort at peace through unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2007 and provision to Gazans of greenhouses and other economic assets on which to build a peaceful economy and civil society; or the Hamas regime’s violent takeover of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority and killings of fellow Palestinians to achieve the takeover; or Hamas’s imposition of a theocratic-totalitarian rule in Gaza including persecution and murder of domestic Palestinian adversaries and suppression of freedoms of speech and religion;

7. WHEREAS CUPE-Ontario condemns the Israeli attack on a building in the Islamic University in Gaza, but fails to acknowledge the Israeli position that the building was being used for military rather than educational purposes; nor that in the 2007 Hamas-Fatah civil war, Fatah forces attacked the same campus for the same reason, namely Fatah allegations that campus buildings were being used to store rifles, munitions, terrorist training, Iranian military advisers, and a hostage; nor that such use of a campus, if confirmed, violates the campus’s educational purpose, removing it from its proper role in civil society and turning it into a military base;

8. WHEREAS CUPE-Ontario in its Feb. 24 Question and Answer section of its web page, in explaining its motion, falsely accuses Israel of the “total destruction of the Palestinian educational system,” and falsely accuses Israel of killing over 40 Palestinians taking shelter at a UN School, whereas there were in fact no fatalities in the school but rather minor damage from the side-effects of an Israeli missile accurately targeted at Hamas militants firing rockets from the street next to the school;

9. WHEREAS CUPE-Ontario fails to condemn missile attacks against Ben Gurion University and schools and kindergartens in missile range of Gaza, or terrorist attacks against Hebrew University and a Jewish Seminary and other Israeli schools;

10. WHEREAS CUPE-Ontario fails to acknowledge that Israel’s casualties (from Gazan missile attacks) were lower than Gazan casualties not because of Hamas’s lack of intent to kill, but because Israel implemented an intense civil defense effort that required tens of thousand of Israeli school children, for several years, to take part in frequent, sometimes daily, and often traumatic escapes to shelters from homes and elementary schools;

11. WHEREAS CUPE-Ontario fails to acknowledge that the Hamas regime has impaired prospects for Middle East peace by rejecting Israel’s right to exist and refusing to comply with past peace agreements and is considered a terrorist organization by Canada, the United States, and the European Union;

12. WHEREAS CUPE-Ontario selectively calls for Israel to immediately abide by UN Resolutions 242, but does not call on Palestinians to also abide by it; nor does CUPE-Ontario call on Israel’s enemies to abide by other relevant resolutions, such as resolutions against terrorism or, for example, UN Resolution 1559 requiring the terrorist group Hizbullah to disarm and withdraw from Southern Lebanon;

13. WHEREAS Israel is one of the few Middle East countries with an active trade union movement that participates freely and independently in civil society and includes members of both Arab and Jewish heritages;

14. WHEREAS Hamas has suppressed Gazan teacher, doctor, nurses and government staff unions while seeking to impose political ideological control over them (source: Egypt News)

15. WHEREAS in September 2008 the Canada’s Carpenters’ Union, representing 60,000 workers, denounced the few Canadian unions that have condemned Israel, expressed solidarity with Israelis facing continual waves attacks and threats from the majority of their neighbors; and took the position that boycotts and sanctions against Israel reinforce terrorism and undermine prospects for free union movements in the Middle East;

16. WHEREAS On January 13, 2009, Paul Moist, the president of CUPE National (under which CUPE-Ontario is a branch) asserted that the CUPE Ontario resolution “is wrong and would violate the anti-discrimination standards set out in the CUPE constitution.”

17. WHEREAS in 2002 the executive committee of the American Federation of Teachers, of which UUP is an affiliate, found academic boycotts to be “anathema to academic freedom” and through a statement of its president reiterated that position on March 18, 2009, saying such boycotts are “inconsistent with the democratic values of academic freedom and free expression.”

18. WHEREAS the American Association of University Professors in 2006 went on record opposing boycotts of Israeli academic institutions as did almost 300 American University presidents, including President John Simpson of the University at Buffalo, and President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University, who said that “If you boycott Israeli academics, you boycott us at Columbia.”

19. WHEREAS in 2008 over 11,000 academics, including 33 Nobel Laureates and 55 college and university presidents, signed the statement (circulated by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East) asserting that those who boycott Israeli academics will be construed as boycotting them (the signatories) as well.

20. WHEREAS many members of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, including members of the University at Buffalo chapter, who are members of UUP, have as an act of protest asked for and received affiliation with Israel academic institutions and are therefore directly targeted by this CUPE-Ontario resolution;

21. WHEREAS such a boycott violates SUNY’s principle of nondiscrimination on the basis of nationality (Israeli), religion (Jewish), and creed (Zionist);

22. WHEREAS the University at Buffalo workers, along with all State University of New York employees, have a long history of intellectual, scholarly and research involvement with nationalities in the Middle East, including Israel, and believe that open contact and free interchange are pathways toward peace;

23. WHEREAS CUPE-Ontario has, despite the complex context of war against Israel, prejudicially singled out Israeli institutions as the sole foreign academic organizations for sanction, while genocides, human-rights repressions, wars, or politically induced famines are ongoing in Sudan, Iran, Congo, Indonesia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Myanmar, China, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere;

24. WHEREAS at the Arab League meeting in Cairo on March 29, 2009, Arab leaders used international demonization of Israel-the kind of demonization perpetrated by the CUPE-Ontario resolution-to mask and divert attention from Sudanese genocide and to rally support for the Sudanese president, who is under indictment for mass rape, pillage, and genocide;

25. WHEREAS this prejudicial targeting of Israeli academics by CUPE-Ontario falls into a pattern of global scapegoating in which Israel is vilified and demonized, while brutal human rights abuses around the world are ignored, amounts to a form of anti-Semitism; and this scapegoating resembles Nazi-era blood libels, boycotts, and dismissals directed against Jewish professors;

1. RESOLVED that UUP [local chapter/Delegate Assembly/Executive Committee] denounces CUPE-Ontario for its anti-Israeli resolution and calls on it to withdraw the resolution;

2. RESOLVED that UUP [local chapter/Delegate Assembly/Executive Committee] calls for the resignation of CUPE-Ontario leadership that promulgated this resolution;

3. RESOLVED that [local chapter/Delegate Assembly/Executive Committee] calls for open, civilized, and intellectually informed debate, open to all standpoints, about Middle East conflicts and human rights abuses, and about the role of global scapegoating in masking brutal war and repression around the world.

For further information contact Prof. Ernest Sternberg ezs@ap.buffalo.edu