April 2002 Steven and Hilary Rose “initiated” [quote from Steven Rose, downloaded 26 October 2006] the call for a moratorium on European research collaboration with Israel. Later they set up BRICUP, the British Campaign for the Universities of Palestine and PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. They now pose as people who are responding to a Palestinian call for boycott.

May 2002 Mona Baker, UMIST, sacks two Israeli academics, Miriam Shlesinger from the board of her journal, The Translator and Gideon Toury from the board of her journal, Translation Studies Abstracts because of their connections to Israeli universities. Both have long and distinguished records as campaigners for human rights and for peace in Israel and Palestine.

May 2003 Sue Blackwell proposes a motion at AUT Council asking members to sever "any academic links they may have with official Israeli institutions, including universities." Council discusses the motion and it is defeated.

June 2003 Andrew Wilkie, rejects the application of an Israeli PhD student to study at Oxford University because he is Israeli.

April 2005 Sue Blackwell comes back to AUT council with what she claims is a more sophisticated and tactical attempt to win a boycott. She proposes to boycott three particular Israeli Universities. She also says that she now has a “clear call from Palestinians”. There is a truncated debate at Council which does not include speeches against the motion. AUT votes to boycott Bar Ilan University because of its links with a college in the West Bank. It votes to boycott Haifa University on the bases of libellous allegations concerning academic freedom there. And it votes to ‘refer back’ proposals to boycott Hebrew University, Jerusalem, on the basis of a libellous claim that the university was building a new dorm block on Palestinian land.

About 300, mainly Jewish, academics resign from AUT. More would resign but for a group of us who form the Engage network and website, arguing that the vote can be reversed only if academics remain within the union.

Haifa University and Hebrew Univeristy begin proceedings to sue AUT for libel. Their letters to AUT are here and here.

Engage finds a constitutional way to force a re-call conference to discuss the issues properly.

Debates are had up and down the country in AUT local associations. The boycotters do not win their position in any of these debates.

May 2005 There is a 5 hour debate at the Special Council meeting on the issue. This meeting is better attended than any routine council meeting and it is connected to opinion of the members by the preceding debates. Special Council decides to rescind the boycotts and to set up a Special Comission to work out a consistent policy.

April 2006 AUT’s Special Comission, elected from members, proposes a consistent and thought-through policy - here. It is a policy that leaves open the possibility of boycotting universities but that sets forward a consistent procedure that ought to be followed. Crucially, a university can only be boycotted if the academic union at that institution calls for it.

May 2006 Natfhe votes for a motion at its conference, three days before it merges with AUT, to boycott Israeli academics who don’t “publicly dissociate themselves” from “Israel’s apartheid policies”. The leadership of AUT and Natfhe say that this policy does not stand in the new union.

May 2006 Richard Seaford of Exeter University refuses to review a book for an Israeli journal saying: “I have, along with many other British academics, signed the academic boycott of Israel, in the face of the brutal and illegal expansionism, and the slow-motion ethnic cleansing, being practised by your government.”

The boycott campaign is now gearing itself up for the first Congress of the UCU (University and College Union) in May 2007, where it will bring new boycott proposals. Currently it has dropped the proposal for a political test which would excuse politically clean academics from Israel from the boycott, and it is arguing for an ‘institutional’ boycott. The hope is that it will be seen as a boycott of Israeli academia that does not target individual Israeli academics. It would, of course, target Israeli academics. It is individuals who write papers, who seek to be published in journals, who sit on editorial boards, who attend conferences.

While the open campaign to win the academic union to a boycott policy forges ahead, the covert campaign to secretly carry out acts of discrimination against Jews in UK universities is also gathering pace. The BRICUP website offers advice as to how academics can make such silent protests.