The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) is calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, which the Israeli labour movement opposes. It bases this BDS decision on its own June 2008 report called simply 'Israel and Palestine'.
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Bob From Brockley writes:

"On the bus this morning, I was reading a review by Henry Siegman of two books about the Israeli settlements in the Occupied lands. The review is a sharp indictment of the settlement movement, and the wider Occupation policies of the Israeli state.

About half-way through came this extraordinary claim:

"...the driving force behind the settlements ...

Tim Crane is Professor of Philosophy at Univesity College London, and Director of the Institute of Philosophy in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. The following communication is posted with his permission:

Dear Eve

I've just become aware through reading the THE that the UCU is up to its unpleasant anti-Israel thing again, and this led me, through the internet, to your excellent letter of resignation from the UCU on the normblog. So I wanted to congratulate you on that letter, and to show solidarity! The UCU's obsession with the vilification of Israel and its attempts to undermine relations between UK and Israeli academics is disgraceful and it is an embarrassment to UK higher education.

I myself resigned from the AUT some years ago in an apparently hopeless protest against the stance it was taking towards Israel. I hope that clear public statements like yours will encourage those sensible members of the UCU to persuade the union to stop repeatedly asking its members to discriminate against Jews.

With best wishes

Tim

When is UCU going to act to stop these resignations? And when is UCU going to understand that resignation is not, as Howard Moss suggests "the easy way out" but is rather the action you take when you feel that there is nothing more you can do?
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Further to this from Roger a while back, Jonathan Chait reviews Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, outlining how she grew the materialist underpinnings of No Logo into an over-arching theory that corporations are vultures which provoke or hope for disaster.

""I felt it emotionally," she told The New York Times, "before I understood it factually." Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was - guess what? - part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization."

So it is, she reckons, that Israel decided to sack the peace process in favour of garnering profits from the War on Terror:

"Almost nothing can confound Klein's cookie cutter. You might have thought that, say, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in non-monetary things such as land, religion, security, and ideology. But it is not, as the doctrinaire Klein confidently explains. Israel made a peace deal with the Palestinians in 1993 because "Israeli corporations were tired of being held back by war," and thought that if Israel made peace, it would "be perfectly positioned to be the Middle East's free-trade hub." But then what changed? The answer is the Israeli economy: "the flipping of Israel's export economy from one based on traditional goods and high technology to one disproportionately dependent on selling expertise and devices related to counterterrorism." Klein takes an unusual view of the causal relationship. Rather than terrorism instigating the rise of Israel's counterterrorism sector, Klein sees the relationship working in reverse: "the rapid expansion of the high-tech security economy created a powerful appetite inside Israel's wealthy and most powerful sectors for abandoning peace in favor of fighting a continual, and continuously expanding, War on Terror." So Israel decided to provoke bomb blasts in its buses and pizzerias largely - again, she dutifully concedes that it was not the sole factor - because building blast walls and bomb detectors became more profitable than living in peace."

Untempered materialism leads to ascribing the worst motives to everyone and everything.
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Gisha, the Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement, has created a presentation about the Gazan students who are prevented by the blockade from taking their places at universities abroad.

You will also find the June 08 report Held Back: Students Trapped in Gaza on Gisha's site.
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Howard Moss in a letter in the THE Here. Unfortunately the letter was edited and it leaves out the important part that argues explicitly that leaving UCU is the easy and the wrong solution.

You can read the letter online but here is the original letter sent before it was edited :

"Dear Editor,

It is undoubtedly extreme for Baroness Deech to recommend that Universities derecognise the University and College Union for the motion it passed at its last conference on links with Israeli universities (“Derecognise UCU over Israel motion, says Deech”, 10 July). Nor, as anyone on the ground will tell you, is it in any way true that there is ‘an atmosphere hostile to Jewish academics … in this country’. Basically everyone just ignores UCU on this issue. At the same time it is undeniably true that the union is fishing in murky waters. It is allowing a tiny (yes tiny) minority of its members to dictate its agendas.

The way to deal with this is not to vilify or campaign against the union as Deech is doing or to resign from it as Eve Garrard, mentioned in the same article, has done. That is the easy way out and is actually regarded as a positive result by the tiny minority which thinks the union exists to fight against Israel. The real solution is for enough people (and it would not take many), to come forward from the rank-and-file membership, which overwhelmingly opposes UCU official policy on Israel, to get themselves nominated at local level and to vote appropriately at national level. That is is the right way to set the union back on the responsible track of focusing on its key purpose of protecting and improving the pay and conditions of its members."

Howard Moss
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Baroness Tonge gained notoreity after saying that if she was a Palestinian, she would consider becoming a suicide bomber. Inspite of the power and influence of the “pro-Israeli lobby” Baroness Tonge was subsequently made a Lib Dem peer , and in a meeting in September 2006 said the following :

“The pro-Israeli Lobby has got its grips on the Western World,” she said. After a short pause she went on to explain exactly what sort of grips she was referring to: “its financial grips.”
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Funding and collaboration - at least £700k over five years in the form of the Britain and Israel academic exchange partnership - is one response to the academic boycott campaign. In fact, we're to understand it wouldn't have happened without the boycott campaign.

Like Tempus, the EU-funded collaboration mentioned earlier, this programme, by presenting the solid fact of funded collaboration, negates the boycott. As European Commissioner for Culture, Media and Sport Jan Figel said:

"My presence here, this agreement that was just signed, the dialogue and participation which will ensue, are the clearest answers to calls for an academic boycott," he answered. "They are better than any polemics"

Nobody's sniffing at funding or organised collaborations - they are great.

Does this mean that the arguments against antisemitism and for academic freedom are won?

Update: a response from Ben Cohen on Z-Word Blog.
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here.

Tempus is an exchange program for higher education students, professors and university staff between the EU and its neighbor countries.

"At a press conference after the signing ceremony Figel was asked about efforts in Europe to organize academic boycotts against Israel. "My presence here, this agreement that was just signed, the dialogue and p ...