Three years ago, when the AUT (as it then was) passed the first Israel-boycott motion, I was in New York. On learning of the decision I put up a short post saying that, had I still been a member of the union (which I wasn't because I'd retired from the university in 2003), I would now be resigning from it. A few days later, I posted again more fully, explaining why 'I wouldn't be willing to belong for a single day to a union which has adopted an anti-Semitic policy', even while respecting the view of those who wanted to remain in the AUT to fight to reverse the decision. I returned to the subject again here, setting out among other points argument for the thesis that resigning and opposing the boycott decision from outside the AUT was also a form of actively fighting it.
As everyone knows, that boycott decision was later overturned, to the credit of the union, but after the merger which produced UCU, the issue was brought back by the pro-boycotters and in 2007 we were only spared another round of the boycott/anti-boycott fight because the union executive received legal advice to the effect that the resolution about to be put would be unlawful. Readers of normblog will have seen from the posts here by Eve Garrard and Shalom Lappin late last week that the boycotters in UCU, undeterred by that legal advice, have now succeeded in carrying what amounts to a covert, 'decentralized', boycott resolution (scroll down here to motion 25): this speaks of the 'apparent complicity' of the Israeli academy with illegal Israeli government policies and invites colleagues 'to consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions' and 'the appropriateness' of continuing such links.
In posting once again on this matter, it's not my purpose to repeat the arguments I've made at length in the past opposing an academic boycott of Israel. (A round-up of links to earlier posts on the subject may be found here.) It is rather to register what I think is the political meaning of this latest decision by the principal union of British academics. No one should be misled by talk of solidarity with the Palestinians. Solidarity is expressible with any people that has suffered, or is suffering, an historical injustice without the add-on attempt to ostracize and/or punish academics of one nationality. The boycotters understand this perfectly well, in as much as their solidarity statements and efforts in relation to all other peoples than the Palestinians are free of the ostracizing and punitive add-on. The latter is seen by them as relevant to Israelis and Israelis only, for reasons that have never been persuasively explained. The University and College Union is now therefore committed to a policy which is anti-Semitic: aimed at Israeli Jews alone and at no other academic community on the entire planet, irrespective of the gravity of the crimes committed by the governments of the countries such academic communities inhabit. According to one account of the proceedings that led to the most recent UCU decision, a speaker who raised the issue of anti-Semitism was jeered for doing so, 'albeit mildly'. Perhaps we should draw comfort from the fact that the jeering was merely mild and not raucous. The conclusion is, in any case, now unavoidable that the UCU is a union that is morally tainted. Containing a core of activists who will keep returning with boycott motions so long as their previous efforts have failed; who will try to bypass clear legal advice by reformulating their aims in a more surreptitious way; who are unwilling to have this issue put before the union membership as a whole; and who are so insensible of the historical weight of anti-Semitism and its consequences as well as of its contemporary resurgence that some of them see fit to mock the very mention of it as being a diversion; the union appears to lack what is necessary to deliver them the defeat that they deserve.
That is the taint now on UCU, one that, unless and until the latest motion is rescinded and the boycott issue is disposed of once and for all, affects everyone remaining in the union - if for no other reason than that they have not made the effort needed to demonstrate that their union does not belong to these pro-boycott obsessives. While Motion 25 stands, the union is a tainted, a befouled, organization; it is a cesspit. It accommodates people who would treat their Israeli counterparts as pariahs. It should be held in contempt and shunned. The only good reason for anyone now to belong to UCU is to exert themselves to take it back from the boycotters and turn it into something better than a cesspit.