Dear Sally

Thank you very much for your email about supporting fellow UCU members in potential industrial disputes. It is clear from both the tone and content of your email that UCU faces important challenges in protecting and improving pay and conditions for FE and HE staff. It will be a pity if our employers continue to behave in a way that undervalues our professionalism in a way that leads to industrial dispute. I regard it as extremely important that UCU is as strong and united as possible to be able to stand up for the rights, pay and conditions of its members, including effective industrial action should that be necessary.

In your email, you have asked me to contribute to the UCU strike fund. This is something that I would like to be able to do, as I believe that it is important for UCU to be as strong and united as possible. I hope you appreciate, however, that at the present time, I do not feel able to contribute; I hope that by this time next week I will feel that I can.

I have been a member for UCU/AUT for just over three years. In all my life living in the UK, I can say that this is the only organization with which I have been involved in which I have been made to feel uncomfortable as a Jew - and specifically as a Jew all of whose family is Israeli. Repeated calls for boycott of Israeli institutions, the circulation of vitriolic, offensive and untrue allegations, the fact that Jewish members have either been excluded or bullied out of the activists list, have led to a culture in UCU that I have to describe as institutionally anti-semitic. I choose these words carefully because I am sure that the individuals involved do not themselves mean to be anti-semitic; but the net effect of these actions is to create a culture in the trade union in which Jews and Israelis feel alienated or excluded. I know Israeli colleagues who will not join UCU because they perceive it as being prejudiced against them. I know non-Jewish, non-Israeli colleagues who will not join or who have left UCU because they perceive it as being prejudiced against Jews and Israelis, and not focussed on the important matters of pay and conditions which you wrote about in your email.

I regularly consider my position as a member of UCU, and, if congress again votes in favour of anti-Israel motions, will consider my position again. I will probably stay, if only out of dogged refusal to give way to a bigotted position. I would love to be able to contribute to the strike fund; but before I could make such contributions, that could help people who are in a different financial situation from me, I need to be able to feel that I belong to a trade union who accepts me for who I am: a Jew with an Israeli family.

You are the General Secretary of UCU. It is your job, alongside the other leaders of this Union, to take strong and decisive action to deal with this appalling situation.

Best wishes

Dov
cc Linda Newman, Roger Kline

Dov Stekel
Centre for Systems Biology
School of Biosciences
University of Birmingham