A Union Takes a Stand

The Association of University Teachers, the union of which I’m a member, has always served me very well. So when Westminster College, the Methodist College in Oxford on whose theology faculty I worked in the 1990’s, decided that its faculties of Education and Theology should merge with Oxford Brookes University with both the loss of Methodist identity and the redundancy of some staff, the Union’s advice and representation were invaluable in negotiating my redundancy payment. It also came to my aid in a different matter. As a resident Tutor with pastoral responsibilities on site and provided with a College flat, the College’s Personnel Officer assumed the right to tell me who I could and could not have to stay in the flat. I insisted that my Union representative should be present at this discussion, and the Personnel Officer quickly discovered his reverse gear.

Although formally retired and in receipt of a teachers’ pension, I’ve returned to academic work on a part-time basis at Lampeter University, and remain a union member. This week at its annual conference, my union took the controversial step of boycotting two Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar-Ilan because it regards them as being complicit in the abuse of Palestinians in the occupied territories. The boycott had been called because Haifa University is alleged to have placed restrictions on the academic freedom of any staff who speak out against the current Israeli government’s policies, and Bar-Ilan is alleged to have links with a college in the disputed settlement of Ariel. There are also allegations concerning the prestigious Hebrew University, but the Union is taking no action in this case until it has been thoroughly investigated.

I can’t tell you what the boycott will actually mean in practice as that is to be revealed in a mailing which the union will shortly be sending out. But as one might expect, the announcement of the boycott alone has prompted fierce reactions. Sources within the Palestinian Authority have warmly welcomed it as a gesture of solidarity with Palestinian people and their ambitions. The Palestinian founder of the Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel says that the union’s action makes it “acceptable to compare Israel’s apartheid system to its South African predecessor”. The apartheid image is a common one amongst Palestinians who remain aware of the close links that the Israeli government established with the South African apartheid regime, to the extent that it is still alleged that the Israelis were assisting the regime develop a nuclear capability.

There have been the predictable responses from the Jewish community with the deputy Israeli Ambassador in London noting that “the last time that Jews were boycotted in universities was in 1930s Germany”; the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declaring that the decision is “misguided and unbalanced in the extreme”; the Board of Deputies of British Jews denouncing the boycott as “blinkered, irresponsible and dangerous”; and the Union of Jewish Students in the UK calling upon the government to establish a full enquiry into the obvious extremism amongst both staff and students on British campuses.

There is dissent amongst the university community as well. The association representing university employers has raised the issue of whether the boycott is contrary to laws relating to contracts, race and religious discrimination, as well as to the spirit of academic freedom. The representative body of vice-chancellors of British universities has similarly condemned the action. What remains clear in all this is that any criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians continues to provoke deep passions.

I know Haifa University quite well. When I was living in that city in the 1970’s a colleague and I would several days a week, very early in the morning, motor from our base in Wadi Nisnas up Mount Carmel to the University’s spectacular site, to play a few sets of tennis before motoring back down to a city beach for a quick dip in the Med before breakfast. We were at that time members of a team working with the Christian community on development projects in that city and we forged strong links with the University, and in partnership with its Sociology department conducted the first social survey of urban Arabs undertaken since 1919. There were many disturbing findings in this piece of research including evidence that Israeli agents were promoting drug use amongst young urban Arabs, allegedly so that their communities could be characterised as dysfunctional.

Our team also became involved in education issues, converting an abandoned Anglican hospital into a hostel for young Palestinians, many of whom had come into the city from rural areas in search of education, and had been forced to sleep rough on the streets. We quickly became aware that while limited access to tertiary education was available at technical college level, there was virtually no possibility of Arab students gaining entry to Haifa University. All this of course was in that era when Israel sported a ‘socialist’ government under Golda Meir, which ought to have been ideologically committed to equality of opportunity. But Golda of course had notoriously declared that no such people as Palestinians exist and since that time, with governments lurching ever further to the right, I cannot imagine that the educational opportunities for Arabs have improved much in respect to Jewish universities.

It is with this experience in mind that I personally applaud the action my union has taken this week. There are times when the freedoms we academics cherish so much need to be extended to those whose situation of oppression and degradation allows them no freedoms, least of all access to education. So I find myself echoing the words of the union member who co-authored the motion calling for the boycott. “I am proud today to be a member of a union that is prepared to stand up for human rights around the world”.