Hopefully, next Wednesday, the University and College Union (UCU) will begin its first-ever conference by taking a clear, internationalist and intelligent stand for peace between Israel and Palestine; for an end to the Israeli occupation; for solidarity with Palestinians, Palestinian academics and the Israeli peace movement; against anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish racism; and against those who propose an exclusion of Israeli Jewish academics from UK campuses, journals and conferences.
UCU should take sides with academics who fight for academic freedom, it should take sides with both Israelis and Palestinians who fight for peace and against the demonisation of the other; it should take sides with those who want to build a peaceful and democratic Middle East against those aspire only to a negative politics of destroying the “evil” of “Zionism”.
The hard core of the boycott campaign will be in Bournemouth for the conference, pushing its simplistic and one sided certainties. It is organising a fringe meeting the night before, 8.30, at the Royal Exeter Hotel, opposite the conference centre. Regardless of what happens at the conference, the boycott campaign won’t stop; it’ll be back year after year after year. It will always find one or two little rump branches to send a boycott motion to conference and it will always find a handful of union members willing to justify it.
Go listen to them on Tuesday, hear them trot out their logical truisms; Israel is apartheid South Africa ; Zionism is racism; Israel is bad; Palestine is good. Israel and only Israel should be punished by boycotts, divestment, sanctions. Academics (but only at Israeli universities) should be held accountable and responsible for their governments’ actions. Israel is a child-killing state, Israel was born in original sin, Israel controls the media, the Zionists control America, Jerusalem sends British and American teenagers to die for it in Iraq.
Every ideological incantation is asserted with absolute certainty, with a confidence that anybody who is good, who is against killing and oppression, who is against burning children must agree, and anybody who doesn’t agree is not good and is for killing and oppression and is for burning children.
The boycott rhetoric does not help Palestinians. But it is seductive because it functions as a way to help boycotters feel better about living in a world in which horrors continue to happen. The boycott rhetoric doesn’t stop the horrors and it doesn’t make the world fair, but perhaps it can absolve us from the existential guilt that we bear because the world is what it is.
Perhaps it can do something about our terrifying feelings of powerlessness? In a post-national and a post-imperial world, the guilt of nationalism and imperialism can be focused on to Israel and we can thereby feel absolved ourselves. It is the ultimate “not in my name” gesture politics. It doesn’t change anything but it enables us to step outside of the tear-stained reality of anti-semitism and empire, Holocaust and Nakba, aggressive settlement and nightclub bombing. But the dream of stepping outside history is vain and is intimately related to the nightmare of totalitarianism.
The question is not whether the small tight core of BRICUP or PACBI activists will continue doggedly to push its one-sided and simplistic world-view – that is a given. What is at stake is the extent to which this core will be taken seriously.
The AUT council briefly endorsed a boycott two years ago, but when the members thought the issue through, it changed its mind. The NUJ is now going through a similar reversal. The rhetoric of the boycott movement can be seductive and the boycotters crave support from people who don’t agree with, who are not even aware of, their core beliefs. The boycotters need support from decent anti-racists who wish to side with the victims of violence and occupation. They need support from people who haven’t thought the issues through or who don’t know much about Israel or Palestine. Around the core of dangerous ideologues is a shrinking periphery of people who think that the boycott will do a little bit of good.
But people who want to see a free and democratic Palestine are finding better ways to fight for peace. They are engaging in practical solidarity ; they are sending books and computers to Palestine, they are teaching at al-Quds and Birzeit, they are supporting schemes like the Olive Tree project which brings Palestinian and Israeli students together; they are doing what they can to facilitate academic and political collaboration between Israel, Palestine and the outside world. And they are engaging in political solidarity; they are supporting the politics of peace, mutual recognition, reconciliation and anti-racism; they are pressurising their governments to do what they can to work for peace; they are engaging positively and intelligently with the beleaguered peace movements in Israel and Palestine.
Everyone who cares about justice, democracy, peace, about Palestinian independence, will also care about fighting against anti-semitism. The motion that the boycott campaign wants UCU conference to pass includes the following:
“Congress believes that in these circumstances [of Israeli occupation] passivity or neutrality is unacceptable and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic.”
But some criticism of Israel is antisemitic and some criticism of Israel is not. The boycott campaign is trying to construct a fantasy world in which being for the boycott defines you as a friend of Palestinians and an all round good person while being against the boycott defines you as an enemy of Palesinians and a racist imperialist.
To remain part of this fantasy world it is necessary for you to vote for absurd motions in order to demonstrate your political cleanliness. This is a world where it is necessary to believe that those who worry about antisemitism do so dishonestly in order to de-legitimise criticism of Israel. This is a world where critical thought is evaluated through its quantity and not its content or nature – and no quantity of criticism is so great that it is anti-semitic. But in reality it is not the quantity of critical thought that may be a problem but its quality.
In the fantasy world it doesn’t matter if you, like Hamas, criticise Israel on the basis that the Jews are a dangerous conspiracy and need to be killed, or do if you, like the boycott campaign criticise Israel on the basis that it is an evil which needs to be confronted, punished and destroyed. I am excluded from this fantasy world because I criticise Israel on the basis that, faced with extremely difficult problems, with violent, aggressive and murderous enemies, Israeli governments have a record of acting in violent, aggressive unwise and counter-productive ways.
The boycott campaign is not really about what happens in the Middle East but about what happens in our unions, on our campuses and in our public discourse. The damage that it does in the UK is that it disables political work in solidarity with those who fight for peace in the Middle East by polarising opinion around an artificial and destructive issue. The damage that it does in the UK is that it creates a commonsense notion among left and liberal people of Israel as an evil in the world, uniquely worthy of punishment and ostracism. It sets decent people who care about Palestinians up for a fight with the overwhelming majority of Jews who are not prepared to legitimise the exclusion of Israelis as acceptable and who are not prepared to denounce Israel and “Zionism” as being evils like apartheid, imperialism or Nazism.
The damage that it does in the UK is to leave the door open for anti-semitic interpretation. There has to be some logic to fill the gap. Israel is far from being the most serious human rights abuser on the planet and yet it is singled out. The boycotters take the risk that the zeitgeist will fill the vacuum at the heart of their own politics with anti-semitic answers.
The boycott campaign won’t go away but on Wednesday I hope that it will be marginalised and rejected by academic trade unionists who will opt for peace and solidarity rather than clear consciences and the politics of destroying evil.
