I do not profess to be an academic. Neither am I a preacher and many of you are, for the most part already converted, so I will just add my voice to the universal outcry against this ill conceived boycott.

No lesser person than, what I can only describe as, Sue Blackwell, has admitted, and I quote:

“A CAMPAIGN TO EXCLUDE ISRAELI ACADEMICS FROM CAMPUSES WOULD BE ILLEGAL.”

She is, of course, aware that it is impossible to boycott institutions without boycotting individuals. The point is that the motions themselves for economic, cultural and academic boycotts have received so much oxygen from the mouths of the promoters and the response from the media that most people believe they are already passed.

But the TGWU and UCU will not allow a referendum on this issue. WHY? Union meetings are generally composed of hardliners, let’s face it the people whose creed is their life and vice versa, are the people who keep unions in existence – I’m trying not to use the word extremist because it has such connotations nowadays, but ...without the extremists the unions would dissipate and grind to a toothless halt.

These votes are the votes of the teeth and spleen of the body politic, not the brain.

Let us please hear their members opinions. Let’s hear what their rational members think of this boycott, at a time when Israel has just agreed to release another 250 prisoners as a good will gesture to Fatah.

At a time when more Israelis and Americans and Jews in the Diaspora than ever before – believe in the two state solution as the only hope for peace.

At a time when the majority of the very professors whom these hardliners want to ban - from the free exchange of ideas and from renewing grants to carry out research to benefit the world – actively support the moderate road to peace and a two state solution.

I ask you, what benefit do they think this kind of illegal bludgeoning is going to have for the cause of peace when continuing dialogue is peace’s only hope.

1) The Boycott of Israeli Academics flies in the face of academic freedom the world over.The free exchange of ideas across the world can only benefit the world of Science, Health the Arts and the environment.

2) It is the metaphoric burning of books, and we know where that leads.

3) It reflects badly on a Britain whose credence as a world power is , in the wake of Iraq, at a low ebb. The boycott has been universally condemned by academics.

4) There are Arabic and Palestinian professors in Israeli universities who will suffer from this boycott.

There are already 8,000 signatures in a statement of solidarity in which the signaturists decline to participate in any activity from which Israeli academics and International Academics of all political leanings have subscribed to the web site of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. This boycott makes no sense and sensibly, the NUJ have seen that and removed it from their agenda.

THERE IS ANOTHER QUESTION INTO WHICH THE BOYCOTT SNUGLY FITS. Is this wide spread Anti Israeli bias merely a reflection of the plight of the Palestinians or is it the new acceptable face of the new Anti-Semitism? When the French ambassador to London can dismiss the democratic state of Israel - in fine diplomatic terms - as ”that shitty little country” without redress, we know that it’s not going to be long before the Jews are about to resume their old role as the world’s oldest scapegoat.

The fact is that the Jews have, like Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife,to be above suspicion.

Why, as writer Nick Cohen asks, is Palestine such a cause for the liberal left , but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, North Korea or Burma with their appalling list of human rights abuses? There is a genocide of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Darfur that no-one seems remotely interested in. Ethnic cleansing is driving refugees by the thousand into surrounding countries. Executions have gone up in Iran and China and Saudi Arabian an alarming measure in the last years. Why single out Israel for rebuke in such a different way from such rogue regimes?

Why was the NUJ – Journalists of all people - demanding a boycott of Israel at the precise time that Palestinian radicals were strapping an explosive belt onto British journalist Alan Johnson?

Is any puffed up journalist ever going to mention the fact that in Syria and Saudi Arabia or Zimbabwe or Burma there is no freedom of speech for journalists or opposition voices at all?

Why is there no media or union interest whatsoever in the continuing captivity of the two Israeli soldiers which precipitated the war in the Lebanon?

Why in this pro-Palestinian love fest, is it never mentioned that the saviour Arafat secreted millions of pounds of donated aid into numbered bank accounts? Can anyone here begin to conjecture the aggrieved and detailed minutiae which would have accompanied a similar massive fraud by an Israeli minister?

No, say the anti-zionists, the Israeli’s brought this on themselves by appropriating Palestinian territory did they not?.

The fact is that - the PLO was founded three years before the six Day War with the avowed aim of destroying the State of Israel.

The Fact is that - territory gained in war is NEVER given back by invading armies. Name one.

The fact is that - the Israelis did give back land for peace and will do it again if they are recognized, by the countries which surround them, as an existing state.

The fact is - For the 800th time but not the last – why, when the Knesset and every right thinking , non extremist Jew in the universe is in favour of a two state solution, when thinking people from both sides privately and publicly admit that it is the only way forward, have the unions suddenly declared Israel guilty of terrorism?

The fact is that we are being terrorised on or own doorstep. And in Bali and Madrid and the U.S. and there is no disputed territory in any of these places.

The fact is that when you live with terrorism for as long as has Israel, almost 60 years, then you do make mistakes. You do behave badly. You do resort to building barriers to stop rockets and checkpoints to stop suicide bombers. (There is, incidentally, a wall in existence between Pakistan and India which seems to have escaped the notice of the wailing wallers.)

How badly did our police get it wrong when, after one terrorist attack on the city, they shot a Brazilian electrician?

How well did the U.S do at the start of the war in Kosova when they bombed the Chinese Embassy? How well have they done after 7/11 in Guantanamo Bay?

How many prisoners have to be released from Israeli jails only for the act to backfire when they go on to mastermind more civilian deaths?

How much land must be returned so that warring factions amongst the Palestinians can lay waste to it, destroy all infrastructure and attack and kill each other?

How many rockets and scuds must land in Israeli streets before somebody reports it as a an effect rather than a cause?

What must Israel do to redeem itself? 12 miles across in places, and surrounded as it is by peoples whose very constitutions, classrooms, schoolbooks and media stipulate death to the young Jewish state? We are talking about the only real democracy in the Middle East - a fact which brings the same problems - as well – as advantages, which democracy does the world over - when not landlocked by avowed enemies.

Ich bin ein Berliner, JFK once rather comically said in Germany, not realising that he was calling himself a doughnut.

Today I, possessor of more honorary letters after my name than any other ageing celeb who never went to university, must decree: “ich bin ein Israeli University Professor”.

I walk in their shoes, I am part of the think tank of the world, the exchange of progress and enlightenment in the world. I am a peace-loving, tolerant, member of the human race and I implore you to speak out to wipe this motion from the unions and campuses and debating halls of this country.

Make no mistake, this bloody boycott is the thin edge of the WEJ …that’s JEW backwards... and backwards is where we’re heading if we don’t put our heads above the parapet and shout NO.

Maureen Lipman