Lecturers' union supports boycott of 'apartheid' Israel
Britain's largest lecturing union, the 69,000-strong NATFHE, has voted to boycott Israeli universities over what they call Israel's "Apartheid" policies towards the Palestinians.
In a move that is guaranteed to cause international outrage the motion was passed by 106 votes to 71 (with 21 abstentions) at the conference in Blackpool.Tom Hickey, a philosophy lecturer from Brighton University proposing the motion, said there were "important and ringing similarities" between the policies of the Israeli government and the apartheid regime in South Africa.
An exclusion wall had been built in Palestine to separate the communities, which led to unequal development for the two.
"We are asking our members to consider should we or should we not work with Israeli institutions or individuals who turn away from what is happening in Palestine," he said.
One Israeli school had been fired on in the past six years, but the number of Palestinian schools targeted was 185, he said.
In addition, 14,400 Palestinian homes had been partly destroyed and 2,200 totally destroyed."Silence, as Edmund Burke once so memorably observed, is all that's needed for evil to be done," Mr Hickey added.
I have long argued against Israel's policies towards the Palestinians, however, for me this boycott seems to be coming at a very strange time. The Kadima party have been elected with a mandate to evacuate the West Bank, albeit unilaterally, and to establish an Israeli border for the first time since 1967.
Surely this is the very time that we should be engaging with the Israelis rather than trying to isolate them?
Anything that isolates the Israelis will encourage them to behave unilaterally and will ensure that the final status of the borders will not have been negotiated with the Palestinians which will lead to further violence rather than encouraging peace which I believe is, at this moment, tantalisingly close.
Both Israel and the US have promised that any final status of Israel's borders will have to be approved internationally.
Now is the time for the international community to engage, not to disengage.
For that reason, I find this boycott unwelcome.
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