Trade unions have, for many years, fought against discrimination, both racial and gender-based prejudices, therefore it is all the more extraordinary when union members feel that they are being discriminated against or the environment within the union is such that a hostile atmosphere exists, so it is with the University and College Union.
The last few years have seen activists leaving UCU and its forerunner, the Association of University Teachers, one of the most articulate was Shalom Lappin, here’s an extract:
“…
For the past several years an ugly campaign of anti-Jewish provocation has been building on the margins of the Israel hate-fest that the boycott supporters have been promoting on campuses throughout the UK. These events have coincided with ungainly incidents in the broader political domain (Livingstone’s ludicrous antics, for example) and in the media. Jewish students and staff have been targeted for abuse in a way that can no longer be simply passed off as vigorous criticism of Israel. Three students on the NUS Executive recently resigned over the failure of their union to address these matters. The National Executive of the AUT has been equally indifferent to the steady rise of ethnic tensions and the spillover of anti-Israel activity into raw anti-Semitism.”
His reply to a request from UCU for him to reconsider his decision:
“…
The result is an annual boycott pogrom that distracts attention from the pressing concerns of people working in the British university system. It creates massive divisions among the membership, and it generates prolonged turmoil that undermines the credibility of the union.”
The latest UCU member to resign is Eve Garrard:
“Dear Sally Hunt
In spite of my longstanding commitment to Union membership, the recent actions of the UCU are finally driving me out of it. I find that I cannot remain in an institution which sets out to discriminate against its Jewish members.
The passing of Motion 25 at the June Congress is the central, though by no means the only, example of this discrimination. It was clear to anyone who watched the vote take place that the Union delegates, and the National Executive, were determined to punish Israel. They felt that it was not sufficient for them to criticise it - as was, in their view, appropriate for countries like Sudan, Burma and Zimbabwe. Nothing but punishment would do for the Jewish state, and hence it, and it alone, must be the target of a boycott motion.
It has been loudly declared, by yourself and other members of the NEC, that Motion 25 is not a boycott motion. This is probably untrue, as has been pointed out by various legal commentators. But at the very least, Motion 25, proposed and supported by many of the same individuals and political groupings as have tried to force through previous boycott motions against Israel, is a call to prepare for a boycott. The full-strength version of a boycott having been found in 2007 to fall foul of the Race Relations Act, the Union has now resorted to boycott-lite in the hope of evading legal culpability. This proto-boycott received overwhelming support from the delegates and the Executive Committee; indeed so determined were they to pass the motion that they refused to take the risk of allowing the general membership to vote on it. The fact that the UCU is once again taking legal advice to see if the motion can be implemented is unpleasantly clear evidence that it’s the fear of legal intervention, and only that fear, which is preventing the Union from doing what it really wants to do, namely single out Israel for punitive treatment.
This treatment would be discriminatory, since it would impact quite disproportionately, and for no good reason, on Jewish academics and Jewish members of the Union. But the behaviour of the Union, before, during and after Congress, forces me to see that my Union is unconcerned about this. What it really wants to do involves discriminating against Jewish academics, and this fact doesn’t deter it in the least.
The primary impact of Motion 25, as with previous boycott motions, will not be to harm Israel, whose academics will simply transfer their valuable contributions to other, less prejudiced, collaborators. Nor will it have any discernible impact on Palestinians, except perhaps a negative one. The discriminatory procedure which the motion mandates will certainly discredit UK academia. But its principal impact will be on British Jews and Jewish academics. Most, though not all, Jews in the UK, and most Jewish academics, support the existence of Israel, and are extremely concerned that it has been singled out for hostile treatment in this way. Most of them feel that the palpable hostility to Israel and its supporters displayed by the pro-boycotters is based on an astonishingly one-sided, partial, and often quite false account of the troubled history of the Middle East; and that the principal effect, and quite possibly the principal aim, of the boycott project is to demonise and delegitimise Jewish national identity and self-determination. Most Jewish academics feel that Jews have as much right to self-determination and national aspirations as any other people, and that the UCU has become a place where such rights are being dismissed and denied. They increasingly feel that the Union is no longer a place where they can be as much at home as any other members, and that its increasingly chilling attitude to Jewish self-determination is creating an unwelcoming and even hostile environment for people with their political sympathies. And the Executive of the Union has made no attempt whatever to address such concerns. It has treated the worries and fears of its Jewish members with contemptuous neglect.
The discussion of the boycott project on the UCU activists’ list has exemplified much of what I have just described. There has been a constant deployment of some of the most traditional stereotypes of anti-Semitism, thinly concealed under the figleaf of anti-Zionism. Repeated (and demonstrably false) claims have been made that Israel is committing genocide, and is comparable to the Nazis. Those who have not shared the dominant hostility to Israel have been compared to members of an alien species. It has been explicitly asserted by Union activists that those members who resist this demonising of the Jewish state, and who are concerned about the double standards being deployed in the boycott project, are manipulatively trying to distract others from Israel’s crimes, and are indeed part of a conspiracy to do so. The Union has failed to protect its Jewish members from this constant vilifying of Jewish self-determination. Formal complaints about the creation of an atmosphere hostile to many Jews have been dismissed by the Union as groundless. Even more worryingly, complaints which have been made about the possibility of institutional anti-Semitism have not even been addressed by the Union.
The UCU purports to be concerned about equality: it explicitly claims to ‘put equality at the heart of its activities’. But equal treatment is not provided to its Jewish members. It is inconceivable that the constant deployment of racist tropes against members of other ethnic minorities would be regarded with complaisance by UCU functionaries. The leadership of the UCU has not only remained silent about such things where Jews are concerned, it has given their deployers cover and protection by declaring that criticism of Israel isn’t anti-Semitic ‘as such’. The Union prefers to ignore the very obvious fact that some criticism of Israel certainly is anti-Semitic, and that in any case boycotts aren’t a form of criticism at all but rather a form of exclusion and ostracism. The use of glaring double standards, whereby Israel and its supporters are condemned and punished where other and far worse polities are ignored or decorously reprimanded, is something else to which the Union turns a studiously blind eye. But this is discrimination, against an ethnic group for whom such discrimination is a familiar part of their history.
The Union purports to be antiracist: it asserts that ‘racism is widespread throughout further and higher education’, and that the ‘UCU is opposed to race discrimination in whatever form it takes’. But it doesn’t seem to be opposed to current race discrimination against Jews (except when it can be safely attributed to Nazis), and it does seem to believe that the UCU itself is entirely free of the racism which it regards as so widespread elsewhere. It appears to be impervious to the possibility that its own practices are open to question under that heading. Its peevish and self-satisfied response to criticism from the All-Party Inquiry into Anti-Semitism was a salutary example of this, as was the Union’s flat refusal to meet the OSCE Special Representative on combating anti-Semitism. Its officials declared that they were too busy to meet the Representative. Perhaps Union personnel should announce that they’re opposed to race discrimination in whatever form it takes, except when they’re really busy. Even when it is pointed out to the Union, in the clearest possible terms, that its proposed actions constitute institutional discrimination against Jews, it is so determined to persist in those actions that it spends very large sums of its members’ money trying to find out if there is some way in which it can single out the Jewish state for hostile attention and still remain within the law.
The UCU’s obsessional determination to ostracise and punish Israel, and its persistent indifference to the concerns and fears of its Jewish members, have created an atmosphere within the Union which is hostile both to its Jewish members and to its non-Jewish members who support the existence of the Jewish state, and do not believe that it is the sole locus of blame for the problems of the Middle East. I understand that some Jews will want to remain in the Union and try to reform it from within, and I wish them well in this project. But I, like many others, can no longer bear the shame and embarrassment of belonging to an institution which is willing to discriminate against Jews, and whose readiness to do so is supported by leading members of its Executive Committee. Some of these members were elected on an explicitly anti-boycott platform, but nonetheless went on to support this latest attempt to boycott Israel. That includes, to her shame, the President of the Union, Linda Newman; and also, to your shame, the General Secretary, yourself. This Union is no longer a fit place for those who think that Jews have the same rights of self-determination, self-defence, and national identity as other peoples do, and I hereby resign from it.
Eve Garrard”
These and other instances should sound alarm bells with trade unionists, because when Jews are consciously leaving a Union because they don’t feel it is a fit and proper place for them to be in, then something is very wrong with that Union.
Update: see Fresh is Grass
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