UK university lecturers yesterday moved to boycott Israeli academics citing "complicity of Israeli academia" in Israel's 40-year occupation that has "seriously damaged the fabric of Palestinian society through annexation, illegal settlement, collective punishment and restriction of movement."
Delegates at the 120,000 strong University and Colleges Union congress in Bournemouth passed the motion calling for a "comprehensive and consistent boycott" by 158 to 99.
The motion also deplored "the denial of educational rights for Palestinians by invasions, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and shootings and arrests of teachers, lecturers and students."
Anti-Defamation League, a US-based Jewish lobby group, condemned the passage of two resolutions targeting Israeli academics as "biased, unfair and destructive."
"Once again, the central trade union of British academia has been held hostage by a group of radical anti-Israel activists who have rammed through resolutions targeting Israeli academics," Glen S. Lewy, ADL National Chair and Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director said in a press statement. "These outrageous initiatives sully the character and devalue the reputation of all British academics by clearly violating basic standards of academic freedom and by holding Israel and its academic community – the only one in the Middle East where scholarship and debate are permitted to freely flourish - to a different standard than any other country in the world."
Meanwhile the British Green Party welcomed the move by British university staff.
"The ongoing Israeli policy of withholding tax revenues from Palestinian Universities is just one way in which the Occupying Power is denying the human right to education," Green MEP Dr. Caroline Lucas, a member of the European parliament's cross-party delegation to the occupied territories and co-founder and Co-President of the European Parliament's cross-party Peace Initiatives group said. "I, therefore, believe that the time is right to consider a boycott of Israeli Universities - in order to place pressure on the Israeli authorities and to support Palestinian civil society organisations that are calling on the international community to act."
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