UPDATE Interestingly the final piece on the Socialist Worker website now seems to have been airbrushed out of history. However it is still here on the PACBI site.

UPDATE II More from Boycotted British Academic and from David T.

In August 1939 Stalin's Soviet Union made a deal with Hitler's Third Reich to conquer half of Poland each and not to go to war with each other. At that time, the Communist Party in Britain was "pro-peace", and argued against those who wanted Britain to fight a war to defeat Nazi Germany. When Hitler violated his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, the British Communist Party suddenly changed its position. No longer was it "pro-peace" but it suddenly became cheer-leader for the war of the British Empire against Nazi Germany. The party line changed and instantly all Good Communists began arguing exactly the opposite of what they argued the day before.

Of course the Socialist Workers Party is not to be mistaken for something important on anything like the same scale as the Communist International was in the middle of the 20th Century - nor, obviously, is this issue anything like as important - but in its method and habits it is remarkably similar.

In June 2005, when the AUT members' revolt overturned the boycott of Bar Ilan and Haifa Universities, Malcolm Povey, in Socialist Worker, in a piece extremely supportive of the campaign to boycott Israel, wrote

"The left and the opposition to oppression have been strengthened by the campaign for boycott."

Two years later Povey is quoted in Socialist Worker arguing:

"It is only by ensuring that we attend to the ABC of trade union activism that we can effectively carry forward campaigns such as that around the academic boycott."

On 30 May 2007, Tom Hickey, on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party, proposed Motion 30, which was passed by UCU's first Congress, which threw the union's weight behind the campaign for a boycott of Israeli academia. During the debate he said:

"The situation is barbaric, 70 percent of Palestinians are dependent on food aid. If we look away then we make ourselves complicit."

His SWP comrade Phil Marfleet said, when he seconded Motion 30:

"I am a convert to the idea of a boycott after visiting Israeli and Palestinian campuses in 2002, and seeing the reality of the situation for myself."

John Rose, a key SWP organizer, was running around the conference floor, whipping the vote out for Motion 30. He also spoke for motion 30 in the debate and made it clear that he was in favour of a boycott of "Israeli academic institutions". He also made much of his own Jewish identity in order to try to neutralize the sniff of antisemitism in the air and he drafted the name of the "Independent Jewish Voices" to help him. As he says in the video (below):

"I’m from a Jewish background, I was actually brought up in a Zionist home, I’ve changed my mind many many years ago."

Of course in this instrumental use of his own identity, he follows the rich Bolshevik tradition of Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, all of whom often inserted the phrase "as a Jew" in order to demonstrate that the things they said must be true. Not.

On 21 July 2007, Tom Hickey, on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party, argued for a debate about a boycott of Israeli academia in the British Medical Journal, writing:

"In the case of Israel, we are speaking about a society whose dominant self image is one of a bastion of civilisation in a sea of medieval reaction. And we are speaking of a culture, both in Israel and in the long history of the Jewish diaspora, in which education and scholarship are held in high regard. That is why an academic boycott might have a desirable political effect in Israel, an effect that might not be expected elsewhere."

However suddenly on 2 October 2007, only days before the boycott campaign finally collapsed, SWP academic Alex Callinicos articulated a complete change of line for the Party when he argued explicitly against the boycott. First, he declared that a democratic ballot, to allow the union to decide whether it was in favour of boycotting Israeli academia, was a call from something that he referred to as the "Zionist camp". The campaign for a ballot was built primarily by Jon Pike and Jimmy Donaghey, two members of the union, neither of whom have ever said or written anything to indicate that they reside politically in a "Zionist Camp". A ballot was of course supported by Engage too. Some of the supporters of Engage are Camp Zionists and some are just Zionists, but none of us belong to what Callinicos pejoratively calls the "Zionist Camp"; many of us are not Zionists at all. It is true that the call for a ballot was overwhelmingly supported by those who opposed the boycott campaign and was overwhelmingly opposed by those who supported the boycott campaign.

Callinicos went on to argue that the boycott is a bad idea because it is "an issue that divides critics of Israel".

He then argued that "any ballot would be dominated by a well-funded Zionist campaign that would enjoy the overwhelming support of the mass media." Sure, I think we know what he is getting at there.

He then admitted that "the boycott would almost certainly be heavily defeated" in a ballot of UCU members. One minute SWP cadre was the engine of the campaign for a boycott and now, suddenly, Callinicos argued that:

"We should make it clear now that we do not intend to propose an actual boycott of any Israeli academic institutions at the next union congress."

Oh! They were only messing! They wanted a "debate" but they didn't want the boycott. They hid that nice distinction carefully, didn't they?

The SWP has always, of course, put its own interests first, and its political principles second. It had judged that the boycott was unpopular amongst union activists, particularly amongst critics of Israel, and so it suddenly jumped ship from the boycott campaign, leaving its ex-member Sue Blackwell and the initiators of the boycott call, Steven and Hilary Rose, who had worked so hard to win a boycott, hanging out to dry. Also hanging out to dry were loyal Party members Phil Marfleet, Tom Hickey, John Rose and the others.

And, as if by magic, a couple of days after Callinicos had announced the Central Committee's change of line in Socialist Worker, the boycott campaign finally and spectacularly collapsed, following the UCU lawyers reporting that the campaign would violate equal opportunities law. The union's Strategy and Finance Committee voted unanimously to end the union's flirtation with the boycott, and Tom Hickey, a member of that committee, was mysteriously absent and so did not vote.

But now, 6 October 2007, Callinicos has changed his mind yet again. He writes up a new line from the Central Committee in Socialist Worker, starting with a beautiful understatement:

"My suggestion that the left in UCU should not propose a boycott at next year's union congress caused some anger among Palestinian solidarity activists."

I've no doubt it did. He now says:

"I support boycotting Israel, but believed that we needed to head off the danger of a big defeat"

The Central Committee seems to have re-discovered its revolutionary bottle after it, itself, had had a hand in bringing about the collapse of the boycott campaign in UCU.

It will be interesting to see if Hickey and the others are willing to endure the same humiliations as the old Communists Party members, who were forced to disavow, in order to remain loyal, or if they find a comforting fudge with the Central Committee’s blessing, or if they follow the George Galloway faction out of the Socialist Worker Party.

George Orwell well understood the ways of Party intellectuals when he wrote the following in 1984:

...There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage ! The agents of Goldstein had been at work ! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax....

Here's SWP member, John Rose, for example:

David Hirsh

More from Jim Denham, here.