IMPORTANT UPDATE - By Jon Pike

It's been brought my notice that there is a serious ambiguity in this piece. I want to make it clear that Yinon Cohen does not support a boycott of TAU and did not call for a boycott of TAU at the FFIPP conference. The crucial 'When' in the key sentence above has the force of 'when the day comes, if it comes..'

The paper outlines some hypotheticals, some counterfactual cases in which it might be right to support a boycott - viz, when called for by the trade union representing academics at the institution to be boycotted. Yinon Cohen heads that union at the moment. But it does not and he does not, of course, support a boycott. So the hypothetical situation introduced by my 'when' is absolutely and clearly not the case at the moment. I do not support a boycott of Israeli Universities, neither does Professor Cohen, neither does the TAU faculty Union, and he did not call for one.

I assumed the audience both at FFIPP and here knew this.

I also think that a reasonably charitable reading of the piece would make it clear that the misunderstanding is a bit odd. The whole piece is an attack on the boycott position taken the AUT and then overturned, thanks to us. It would be very odd if, in the course of that, I cited and endorsed non-existent support for a boycott from academics at TAU. Nevertheless, an unfortunate ambiguity in my wording allowed this odd view to be taken.

This is a paper given by Jon Pike on 24/09/05 at the "Fear of the Other" conference organised by FFIPP

I want to say something here about the meaning of the AUT boycott and its defeat, something about the policy that the AUT should adopt in the aftermath of the boycott, at its international commission, and something about direct links with Israeli and Palestinian academics and trade unions.

In order to start to go beyond the AUT boycott, it’s necessary first to understand it, partly because that debate helps to frame both what is possible and what is necessary for academics in addressing the continuing conflict, continuing occupation, and continuing injustices in Israel/Palestine.

I want to outline four conceptions of an academic boycott, - First, there is something called ‘Boycott’ (generally with no definite article). Second there is the actual AUT boycott of Haifa and Bar Ilan which lasted from the Annual Council of the AUT on April 22nd to the Special Council of May 26th. Then there are two political conceptions of boycott, so the third is a conception of boycott as punishment, and the fourth, a conception of boycott as solidarity.

First ‘Boycott.’ This is a bit unclear – and perhaps I don’t always have a sufficiently abstract mind - but there is certainly a conception of ‘Boycott’ abroad that is basically free-floating. This conception seems to allow any meaning to be inscribed into it. It is something that individual people might be ‘for’ or ‘against’ but it does not always easy to see how that relates to any particular activity. People talk about it a lot. I ask: what do you mean? In particular, ‘Boycott’ conceived of like this seems to bear only a coincidental relationship to the actual boycott resolutions passed by my union and in place from April 22nd to May 26th.

So that is the first conception of boycott.
The second is the actual boycott that existed in the AUT. It existed because we passed resolutions, with words in them, and those words had meanings.

Let me give an example of the discrepancy between ‘Boycott’ and the AUT boycott: Jacqueline Rose says, in her piece on Open Democracy that:
"It is important to understand that the academic boycott is saying: “Boycott the institution – and yet keep the lines open, not just to the people who you think are OK, this is not about blacklisting – but to anybody at all, if the point of the contact is to address the injustice of the situation in Israel/Palestine.”

If Jacqueline Rose’s claim was true, and if some serious meaning could be cashed out for the phrase ‘boycott the institution but not the individual’ then the actual debate about the actual boycott would have been rather different. But this is not what was said in the AUT: it is not the resolution that was passed, it is not the conception of academic boycott in the PACBI call, it is something different, and different in a morally relevant way. The AUT resolutions explicitly, clearly, called for the exemption of individuals from boycotting who passed a political test – and the exemption from boycott of only those individuals.

The resolution said, in subsection 4(iv) that the AUT would:
‘Exclude from the above actions against Israeli institutions any conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state's colonial and racist policies’

If you exclude some individuals then you include other individuals. If you construct a white list, you thereby construct a blacklist. This is what the words used in the AUT resolution mean. We repeatedly asked for an account of who would be on each list: Hilary Rose responded by saying that ‘everyone knows who is OK.’ Stephen Rose, debating with me on Newsnight, said that Campus Watch showed the way, and identified the right people – we just needed a version of Campus Watch that did the mirror image task, in Israel.

Neither of these proponents of the boycott said – what Jacqueline Rose says – ‘the point is not the person – you can talk to anyone - the point is the intention.’ The resolutions didn’t say that either. It was because they didn’t say that, that the membership of the AUT found that the blacklisting of individual academics and the imposition of a political test was unacceptable.

There isn’t some sort of cuddly, non-threatening, liberal, platonic form of ‘Boycott’ up there, that just involves people of good will talking to each other, that involves the recognition of a context of injustice. Aristotle was right against Plato - the abstract universal exists only in the concrete: ‘Boycott’ exists in the actual boycotts proposed in actual resolutions. If you pretend that there is this Platonic form and endorse it, you will encourage those who want an actual boycott – an actual blacklist, actual political tests, actual sackings from editorial boards and actual enforcement of this within the union.

For this reason, among others, people need to say very clearly that they are opposed to academic boycotts, to get it off the agenda, so that the concrete work can be done properly. FFIPP says that it takes no position on ‘boycott’ But it also didn’t take a position on the AUT boycott of April 22nd to May 26th. Individuals did, its true, but the organisation did not.
One reason that this was, I think, a mistake is because there is another Platonic form – Solidarity – which people talk about a lot, but only really exists in the concrete – in concrete actions of material, financial, political and teaching support. The actual AUT boycott, as Lynne Segal, and many others point out, undermines that actual solidarity.

There are (at least) two further ways of conceiving an academic boycott. The third way is as a weapon and the fourth is as an act of solidarity. Thinking of the boycott as a weapon: If I boycott you, I hurt you - and I hurt you because I wish you to change your ways. Boycott, under this conception is coercive, or at least, and just like other coercive acts - it aims to change the options facing the person boycotted. It does this because it forces the issue: either you stop doing X, or we stop talking to you. Its effectiveness depends on the weight that ‘us stopping talking to you’ has in any calculation.

If we value academic exchange as just about the most important thing in the world, then this will mean putting a very high value on that. But – while academic exchange is very important - this seems to me a rather self referential and pompous way of thinking, especially from the position of thinking about the daily lives of Palestinians, it seems to me to smack of some of the pomposity that is the besetting sin of academics. Boycotting in this way, does not seem to me to be a very good or effective weapon, whether or not it is just, and for that reason, not an effective tool against the occupation. Here, I agree, I think, with Uri Hadar, at least as far as I understand his position in the Radical Philosophy article.

But there is another account under which boycott is seen as an instrument of solidarity – and I want to say something about that. When conceived of as an instrument of solidarity, the key is that those who are – as it were - victims of the boycott call for the boycott themselves. This is the case with the AUT boycott of Fiji, and the current greylisting of Brunel University. In both these cases, the faculty union at each of these institutions called for a boycott of themselves. – of their own institution. This is, of course, not the case with the proposed academic boycott of Israel.

When Yinon Cohen, on behalf of his members calls for a boycott of TAU, then we take that call very seriously – then there is close to an automatic response. Close to, rather than actually automatic, because a union always has to make its own concrete political judgements. The virtually automatic response that is claimed by supporters of the boycott to the PACBI call just ignores this.

The principle involved in this claim rests on the Millian distinction between harm to self and harm to others. The standards invoked in calling down harm on yourself, your institution, are different to those involved in calling down harm onto others. In calling down harm on yourself, or you institution, you take on some of the responsibility for that harm. Pappe, I think, recognises this. Calling down harm on others, you need to justify the very serious disrespect involved in your attitude to those on whom you are calling down harm. The disrespect for persons is shown by the use of coercion rather than reason to get them to change their position. So the calling down of a boycott on another institution just shows a terrible lack of confidence and lack of respect for argument and reason, and a lack of respect and confidence in the capacity of argument with respect to Israeli academics in particular: these guys, it says, cannot be reasoned with. these guys, need to be coerced. Despite what is said about it being a non violent form of protests, it is closest to a form of war, not a form of peace.

The Palestinian call made by PACBI is not a call for a boycott of Palestinian universities (obviously) – it calls for a boycott of Israeli Universities, and the vast majority of Israelis academics oppose such a call. There is so much that is wrong with the South Africa analogy. But here there is a pretend analogy which seeks to pick up on the undeniable moral force of the appeal of the UDF and COSATU for sanctions in South Africa as sanctions on the black majority itself, and seeks to trade with that moral force for sanctions of Israeli Universities. The moral force defeats the argument that ‘they will only harm themselves.’ It trades on the moral force of responding in a relatively automatic way to the appeals of those who are oppressed. But it trades in a way that overlooks the many morally relevant distinctions between the two cases.

There is a more pragmatic version of this view, that, because there is no widespread call within Israel for sanctions, then their introduction would be counterproductive - this is for example, Noam Chomsky’s view - and it’s a good, clear, and obvious one.

The reply offered by those who support a boycott is this: ‘Are we to judge whether to apply sanctions on a colonial power based on the opinion of the majority in the oppressors’ community? Does the oppressed community count at all?’

Note - this is crucial - that this explicitly rest the argument for an academic boycott on the depiction of Israel as a colonial power – and simply a colonial power, simply as an oppressor state, and one therefore where opinion doesn’t matter. Your ABC of international justice will then tell you that the right thing to do with colonial powers is to get rid of them, to wage an anti-colonial struggle for national liberation, and drive them out. Remember, this is all a response to an argument about opinion in Israel- not about colonial-style practices in the occupied territories or similar. It works only on the basis of an incredibly simple minded blocist account of the ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ community, one that is blind to the pluralities of thought and politics in both Israel and Palestine, and, worse, it’s premissed on an end game that is the destruction of Israel.
With this distinction between boycott as punishment and boycott as solidarity, I want to address what the AUT policy being reconsidered over the next months should be.

The policy faces a number of demands: it must be broadly representative of its members and broadly in tune with their – our - aspirations. There is a sizeable chunk of the membership which is opposed to academic boycotts pretty much on principle, particularly when conceived of as a political weapon – and this is how it is conceived.

So the principle of solidarity involved in the boycott policy of the AUT and the merged union will – I hope - be this: AUT ought to consider academic boycotts of institutions only when called to do so by properly representative trade unions at those institutions, in solidarity with those academics, rather than as a punishment against other academics.

This is a genuine conception of boycott as solidarity, rather than a conception of boycott as punishment.
That’s the conception of boycott that should be endorsed, even against the arguments of some liberals, and others, who may raise the principle of academic freedom as a rock-bottom and absolute principle. And it will be good if the AUT subscribes to something like this account, and I think it likely that it will.

Finally, the AUT needs to look to its political hygiene. In the course of the political battle over the boycott, at local branch meetings of the AUT, things were said, that should not have been said. Here, we get on to very contentious ground. If I say that there is a problem of anti-semitism within the AUT, then, I know, I’m going to get accused of ‘playing the anti-Semitism card in order to deflect criticism of Israel.’

But this is pretty straightforwardly refutable. Engage carries clear and sharp criticism of the actions of the Israeli government. Engage stands clearly against the occupation, against the settlements, against those practices and laws of the Israeli state that are clearly racist, and against the often brutal actions of the IDF. So the suggestion that we use the accusation of anti-semitism to deflect criticism looks false, since we voice and endorse that criticism ourselves. And, too, we recognise, and have said plainly, that there is such a use of the charge of anti-semitism, and we think that that use is clearly wrong.

Let me be perfectly clear, in our writings on the Engage website, in our comments to the press, we have not claimed that boycotters are anti-semites, nor that supporting a boycott is a mark of conscious anti-Semitism. We are not especially interested in motivations, or intentions, and we are not well placed to judge them. Equally affirmations of good intent just have nothing to do with the argument. We have said something very different: we have said that there is a case to answer, that there is a problem, that people are buying into a discourse, that there is an issue of institutional, or formal anti-semitism on the left and within anti-Zionist discourse. It is a problem that is beginning to be recognised in some ways, but it is a problem that needs careful analysis and argument.

There is perhaps the sound of too many cards being slapped on the table: we don’t want to slap further ones down, but at the same time there are serious charges to answer. Let’s put it simply. Pro-boycott people should not:

*Continually make analogies between Nazi Germany and Israel. These analogies are, I think obviously false, obviously dangerous, obviously out of order. The Israeli state is not like Nazism, and claiming that it is, is an anti-Semitic claim.

*Explain their defeat by reference to well funded Zionists, or Zionist scabs and their powerful allies. This is laughably false. I know. David Hirsh and I funded it, out of our overdrafts – in the form of phone bills and broadband connections, because what it took was a lot of phone calls and a lot of emails and an active website. How do you win votes in a union? By persuading lots of people, by impressing upon them the importance of turning up, by spreading support, by arguing, and by having a strong arguments that win. The AUT is supposed to be the clever union. So the claim is false. But what does this account say? What is the discourse that it invokes?

*Complain about the ‘Campus Jews’ turning out to defeat the boycott.

*Support political tests and blacklisting of Israeli academics, and uniquely of all the academics in the world, of Israeli academics

*Endorse the political goal of the destruction of Israel, uniquely amongst nation states.

All of these are well documented examples. There is a case to answer here: this isn’t the slapping down of a card, but a developed and carefully articulated critique. It was Edward Said, writing of Palestinian thinking shortly before his death in his reply to Arab intellectuals who defended Roger Garaudy, who said that ‘There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric.’

Something similar with all the appropriate qualifications can be said today. It’s because anti-semitism now routinely depicts itself as anti-Zionism that careful scrutiny of the phenomenon is so important.

The boycott supporters, and what can, at best, be described as their extravagant anti-Zionist rhetoric, have done a lot of damage to the project of building serious, broad-based and practical solidarity with Palestine. FFIPP should have done more to defeat them. Instead it was left to Engage, and we succeeded, and I’m happy to defend that. What now?

Positively, and from, and sponsored by the AUT, there should be more, direct, links between UK faculty and Israeli and Palestinian faculty. For instance, there should be more, positive, support for initiatives like the Foundation for the Al Quds University Medical School. I see no reason why the AUT should not formally back the foundation, supporting its actions in bringing Palestinian Medical students from Al Quds to UK hospitals for their training, facilitating this training, linking up UK institutions with Al Quds. And the AUT has a role in supporting those UK academics who works as teachers and examiners for the Medical School at Al Quds.

But finally, I want to say something about the suggestion that it is up to those of us who opposed the boycott in the AUT to articulate – even to deliver - a programme of successful and effective direct links, and positive solidarity. I have some sympathy for that suggestion – insofar as it is true that the boycott obscured and weakened – even drowned out - any possibilities for making direct links with Palestinian and Israeli academics.

Jacqueline Rose, Ilan Pappe, and others - speaking more honestly than some – talk of adopting the academic and cultural boycott as an output of the politics of despair. And then there is a call – we must do something, and you – the anti-boycotters have to show what the alternatives are – you have to come up with something more effective. I’ve heard it often, but in writing seen it only from Keith Flett. I’ll concede this much – I’ll treat this as a proper argument, rather than just as the accusation, that we don’t recognise the injustices faced by Palestinians.

In the main, this argument is misplaced. Those who oppose one form of fighting injustice, because that way of fighting it is also unjust, have no special responsibility for coming up with alternatives. And - further – this demand that we come up with a non-boycott solution ignores the intractability of the conflict itself and of our response to it.

Here is an analogy – which, like all analogies, is partial, too simple, trivialising and so on. Fred, who is 8, bullies Susan, who is 7, at school. Susan’s father, outraged at this, pounces on Fred, and starts to hit him. You step in to restrain Susan’s father. Susan’s father turns to you and says: ‘But there is an obvious injustice here’ (you agree). He says, ‘I’m addressing that injustice!’ You reply: ‘what you are doing about it is wrong in principle, partial and counterproductive.’ He says: ‘Well, then, you must give me an alternative – it must be effective, it must be just, and it must eliminate the injustice – I’m waiting…’

You go quiet – perhaps you mumble something about school anti-bullying codes. You say, ‘there are no easy answers.’
So Susan’s father says ‘Hah, I thought not: well then, I’m going to continue whacking Fred.’

So the principle, once again, is that those who oppose one method of fighting injustice, because that way of fighting it is also unjust, have no special responsibility for offering alternatives – just as they have no basis for minimising the injustice, or suggesting that the injustice is less intractable than it actually is. In fact, the suggestion that we have such a responsibility is infantilising of those who make it. It amounts to saying – tell us what to do – or even - do it for us - we can’t think it through for ourselves.

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to accept invites to Israeli universities within the Green line, and from Palestinian universities. I’m going to do collaborative research work on justice with suitable research partners, whatever their institution. I’m going to support, politically and financially the work of the Medical foundation for Al Quds Medical school. I’m going to work within my union to ensure that that union supports both Israeli and Palestinian unions. I’m going to continue to oppose the occupation of the West Bank, and the injustices that flow from that occupation. I’ll do all that after the boycott. But I’ll also oppose any further moves to introduce an academic and cultural boycott of Israel in my union.