Under siege

Jews are currently celebrating the festival of Passover . This commemorates the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt, the point at which they gained their freedom and became a nation. The two concepts are intimately connected. On Friday afternoon, when orthodox Jews preparing for both the Sabbath and Passover would have been unable to attend, the Association of University Teachers took a large step towards delegitimising the Jewish national homeland as a prelude to its destruction. It passed a motion calling for a boycott of two Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar Ilan, which it accused of being complicit in the abuse of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and agreed to circulate a Palestinian call for a total university boycott.

The targeted Israeli institutions have denied the specific charges. They were given no opportunity to put their case; indeed, a request from Bar Ilan to send someone to do so at the conference was turned down. This was not surprising to anyone who has grasped what is going on here. For it was not these universities which were on trial, but Israel itself. And for the stupid and vicious people who now pass for our intelligentsia, Israel is a pariah nation — an ‘apartheid state’ — simply because the Arabs who are trying to exterminate it say that this is so.

The vote has drawn immediate protests at the denial of academic freedom that it embodies. I have already commented in posts below on this particular aspect, along with the disgusting requirement for Israeli academics to side with those who would exterminate their nation in order to avoid this punishment. In these circumstances, it was astonishing to hear Steven Rose, the original begetter of the boycott movement three years ago, adduce on BBC Radio Four’s The World Tonight as a reason for this action the ‘appalling’ restrictions by the Israeli authorities on the academic freedom of his Palestinian colleagues who were prevented from moving freely between universities in the territories. No mention by Rose, of course, of the 50-year Arab war against Israel and the systematic mass murder of Israeli citizens by Palestinians — the only reason for those restrictions being applied.

But then, the whole premise of the motion is a truly monstrous lie about who is the aggressor and who the victim in the Middle East, with Israel being wickedly blamed for having the temerity to defend itself against annihilation and genocide. Susan Blackwell, the Birmingham university lecturer (described in David Aaronovitch’s Observer column as a former Christian turned revolutionary socialist) who co-wrote the motion, said the union was ‘standing up for human rights’. What is so terrifying is that, in stamping on the human right to life of the Israelis, she probably sincerely believes this Orwellian inversion of the truth. And these people are teaching our young.

The universities are supposed to be the custodians of truth. But these people are systematically purveying a set of big lies. Thus Rose claimed that Israel was becoming an ‘apartheid state’. This is, of course, demonstrably ludicrous. Israeli Arabs have equal rights in Israel — they can vote, they have members of the Knesset, they can serve in the army and as judges and so on. And if he means the Palestinians in the territories, they are not part of Israel. So the charge of ‘apartheid’ (which, apart from anything else, trivialises what actually happened in South Africa) is nothing other than a wicked slander.

Like Shereen Benjamin, the other co-author of this motion, Rose is himself a Jew. As I have observed before, the role of Jews in the demonisation of Israel betrays a vicious psychopathology. For this process is deeply racist and anti-Jewish, and the fact that some of its proponents are Jews does not make it less so. It not only subjects Israel to a process of demonisation and delegitimisation based on lies and libels but does so obsessively and disproportionately. It singles out Israel for opprobrium and worse while ignoring the multitudinous tyrannies and autocracies where intellectual freedom really is stifled, but where no boycotts are ever proposed. It is deeply racist, denying to the Jews alone the freedom to be a nation in their historic homeland, lawfully constituted by the world.

Disingenuously, Rose denied that the aim of the boycott was to attack the Jewish state. If there was any doubt about this, one has only to look at what influences lie behind it. On the Civitas website, David Conway fills us in:

‘The web-site of the AUT reveals those proposing the motion derived both their inspiration and wording for it from a campaign calling for such a boycott that has been orchestrated and organised by Birzeit University. Part of the conference motion reads:

‘[AUT’s] Executive Council notes that nearly sixty of the most prominent academic, cultural and professional associations and trade unions in the Occupied West bank and Gaza… , [whose views are] thus highly representative of the views of major sectors of Palestinian civil society, have now called for an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions.′

The motion also points out that the full text of their call for the boycott can be found on a website of Birzeit University′s and obligingly provides a link to it. This link reveals their campaign has been orchestrated by a sociology lecturer there named, Lisa Taraki who is elsewhere described as ′Coordinator for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel Occupied Palestinian territories′.

The three Israeli universities whose boycott is being called for are the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Haifa University, and Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. All are located within the so-called ′green line′, and hence within Israel-proper as opposed to the so-called ′occupied territories′. The natural inference from the title of the boycott′s Palestinian Coordinator must be that those there like her who are calling for it must consider all Israel as occupied Palestinian territory, something their literature fully confirms. Hence, one must infer, they will be satisfied with nothing less than Israel’s complete destruction as a Jewish state.’

This is indeed the agenda now running strongly not just in our temples to idiocy known as the universities but far beyond. The willed destruction of the Jewish state is the poison running through the bloodstream of the British intelligentsia. It’s no use saying that the last time Jews were boycotted in the universities was in 1930s Germany, as the British Israel-haters will merely reply that the Jews have turned into the new Nazis. It’s no use saying that their views are anti-Jewish, since they contend that seeking the destruction of Israel is not anti-Jewish. But of course it is, profoundly and viscerally through its selectivity, double standards, moral inversion, obsessional malice and employment of ancient stereotypes.

The AUT motion cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a tiny minority of far-left academics in a marginal union. It may be that other academics, appalled by what has occurred, will resign from that union or protest in other ways. But this development is merely the latest in an apparently unstoppable stream of comments and incidents of an anti-Jewish nature. And the crucial thing is the absence of outrage in the wider community — indeed, on occasion, it provides its endorsement. The AUT motion came at the end of a week which saw the award of the MBE to Orla Guerin, the BBC reporter whose venomous dispatches from Israel have come to epitomise the virulent anti-Israel hatred at the BBC. For her to be given this award, presented by Baroness Symons, the junior Foreign Office minister, is a calculated kick in the teeth by the Labour government towards the Jewish community in Britain, where feeling about Guerin’s reporting runs very high as the government well knows. The Jewish community in Britain is under siege.