After my colleague Jonathan Ginzburg and I released an open letter calling for people to resign from the AUT in light of the recent conference motion to boycott certain Israeli universities, I received requests from well-meaning friends to withdraw this call and work within the union against the boycott. Unfortunately I cannot accept this advice, and I feel obliged to explain the basis for our decision. We are motivated both by a principle and a tactical consideration.
Let me clarify the principle first. Although we are both strong supporters of organized labour, the AUT as a lecturers' union and social democratic values, we feel that the National Executive of the AUT has consistently dealt with the boycott in bad faith. Jonathan, Tom Maibaum and I proposed a motion to an AGM of the King's College branch of the AUT on October 9, 2002. The motion opposed both the boycott of Israeli universities and the Israeli government's repression of Palestinian academic and educational institutions. It passed with a solid majority. Jane McAdoo, who was then President of the AUT, was present at this meeting and endorsed our motion.
For reasons best known to the KCL and National AUT Executives, the motion was not brought to the AUT conference in Scarborough in May 2003. Instead, I had to go up to oppose the Birmingham boycott motion spearheaded by by the Birmingham branch and its SWP supporters. Although the National Executive did not support the boycott, their leadership on this issue was tepid to the point of invisibility. That particular motion was soundly defeated by a two-thirds majority, which should have laid this matter to rest. Instead, the boycott advocates continued to agitate for their proposal without any substantive opposition from the National Executive.
The current 'reduced' boycott motion was scheduled for the day before the Passover Seder, on a Friday, when Jewish members of the AUT who celebrate the holiday were not able to attend the conference. Appeals to Sally Hunt, the Secretary General of the AUT, and the National Executive to reschedule the motion were ignored. In the end, all debate on the motion at the conference was suppressed, and it was simply rammed through with the full complicity of the National Executive.
For the past several years an ugly campaign of anti-Jewish provocation has been building on the margins of the Israel hate-fest that the boycott supporters have been promoting on campuses throughout the UK. These events have coincided with ungainly incidents in the broader political domain (Livingstone's ludicrous antics, for example) and in the media. Jewish students and staff have been targeted for abuse in a way that can no longer be simply passed off as vigorous criticism of Israel. Three students on the NUS Executive recently resigned over the failure of their union to address these matters. The National Executive of the AUT has been equally indifferent to the steady rise of ethnic tensions and the spillover of anti-Israel activity into raw anti-Semitism.
The current boycott initiative is not an attempt to criticise Israel's policy of occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, a criticism that we have repeatedly emphasized that we share. It is a blatant effort to delegitimize the country as such. This comes at a time when Britain is actively participating in the occupation of Iraq, with attendant human rights abuses, and yet no sanctions have ever been suggested against British (or American) universities.
It is particularly remarkable to us that the National Executive has shown itself to be cravenly benign in its response to the ongoing effort by the boycott advocates to turn the AUT into a forum for misguided and self-righteous foreign policy adventures while British higher education finds itself under severe attack from government underfunding. The executive has been ineffective in defending our interests as wage earners and adacemics to the point of serious incompetence. It has consistently shied away from serious industrial action, while choosing militant rhetoric instead. By contrast, the executive has no problem in allowing the union to be taken over by a compact group of extremists who have turned it into a vehicle for their own propaganda agenda.
There comes a time when an organization discredits itself to the point that it can no longer be taken to stand for the values that it purports to represent, principles that, in this case, include industrial democracy, the rights of its workers, anti-racism and equality. When this point is reached, one has no alternative but to dissociate oneself from it.
There is also an important tactical point here. It seems to us that we can bring more effective pressure to bear on the AUT to change its policy on the boycott by encouraging our colleagues to resign than by engaging in endless, unproductive political manoeuvring with the cynical extremists who now hold sway over our union. We very much hope that the situation will change soon, and we will be able to return to active membership in the AUT. (Shalom Lappin, Department of Computer Science, King's College London.)