The British government regrets the decision by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) to vote in favor of boycotting Israeli academics and institutions, British Foreign and Commonwealth Office Minister Lord Triesman said Monday.
“The British Government has a record of supporting academic freedom for academics throughout the world. We also recognize the independence of NATFHE. We believe that such academic boycotts are counterproductive and retrograde. Far more can be obtained through dialogue and academic cooperation,” a statement read.
Members of Britain’s largest college teachers’ union on Monday voted to boycott Israeli academics over what members termed “apartheid” policies and discriminatory practices toward Palestinians.
The 69,000-member National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) passed the motion at its annual conference in the northern English city of Blackpool. Two parts of the proposal passed with a show of hands, while a third went to a vote.
But union spokesman Trevor Phillips said the motion will only act as an advisory policy and will not necessarily be adopted, as the union is to merge this week with the Association of University Teachers, or AUT, to become the University and College Union with more than 100,000 members.
Ronnie Fraser, director of the Academic Friends of Israel, said his group would continue fighting the boycott and called the union’s move “racist.”
“If the sponsors of this boycotting campaign succeeded in something, it is only to undermine further progress, collaboration and peace in the Middle East and to marginalize the standing of NATFHE,” Fraser said.
The third section of the motion called on union members to consider if they should refuse to cooperate with Israeli academics or Israeli research journals that do not “disassociate themselves” from the policies described in the motion.
It said members had a responsibility to ensure “equity and nondiscrimination” in Israeli education institutions and was passed with 106 members in favor, 71 against and 21 abstentions, Phillips said.
Opposition to the vote culminated on Saturday with a letter to The Guardian in which hundreds of academics called on NATFHE to reject the motion.
On Friday, The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) also announced that it condemned the proposed boycott and similarly urged NATFHE to withdraw the motion.
The statement released by the AAAS board of directors said it joined with other organizations “in condemning this proposed boycott as antithetical to the positive role of free scientific inquiry in improving the lives of all citizens of the world, and in promoting cooperation among nations, despite political differences.” It added, “Free scientific inquiry and associated international collaborations should not be compromised in order to advance a political agenda unrelated to scientific and scholarly matters.”
Bar-Ilan University’s International Advisory Board on Academic Freedom also called for an immediate withdrawal of the boycott motion. It published an on-line petition calling on NATFHE members, the academic community and the general public to oppose the boycott, explaining why an academic boycott was wrong. The petition was signed by thousands of international academics.
[ SPME editor’s addition: The petition was initiated by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East spme.org and co-sponsored with the IAB. Repeated mistaken reports repeated from a Guardian report mistakenly attribute the petition to the IAB, which did help produce the petition in hard copy. The petition is at the SPME website for verification.]
In another letter that was also published Saturday in The Guardian, however, a group of Palestinian academics applauded the boycott motion.
Last year another British faculty group, The British Association of University Teachers, voted to boycott Haifa and Bar-Ilan universities, charging them with complicity in Israel’s “suppression of the Palestinians.” The council of the association reversed the decision after objections by leading scholars and academic organizations.
NATFHE and the AUT are due to merge next month and any decisions made by the unions prior to the merger – including a possible NAFTHE vote in favor of boycotting Israeli academics – will be automatically nullified by the merger.
In another, unrelated boycott campaign against Israel, the Ontario division of Canada’s largest union voted Saturday to support an international campaign that is boycotting Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. Delegates to the Canadian Union of Public Employees Ontario convention in Ottawa voted overwhelmingly to support the campaign until Israel recognizes “the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.” The Ontario group represents more than 200,000 workers.