For a ballot of the UCU membership on the academic boycott of Israel

I am a bit confused. How does the ENGAGE resolution for there to be a debate among the membership of the union about an academic boycott of Israel differ from the UCU resolution calling for a debate about an academic boycott of Israel which was passed last year, in the face of fierce opposition from ENGAGE? Is it just that Jon thinks he can win it this time, or is something else going on?

AIUI, the ballot would be indicative, not definitive. The rules of the union make the annual Congress the supreme policy-making body. (Industrial action is different, of course.)

But it’d be mad for Congress to go against a substantial vote one way or ‘tother. If you’re being ungenerous, ENGAGE and fellow travellers want a ballot because they think it’ll give an overwhelming rejection of a boycott, and the pro-boycotters don’t want one for precisely the same reason.
(It isn’t quite as crude as that, of course.)

ahh I see.

EJH, I do this sort of thing rarely. The union should ballot on industrial action, and it should also ballot on pay offers that are provisionally accepted by the negotiating team on behalf of the membership. I think it should also ballot the entire membership when considering any international boycott, Zimbabwe, Israel, Burma, or China. Myself, I’d like a conclusive, not an indicative ballot, since it seems to make sense that the authority of congress is derived from the membership. But as Michael Mouse points out, the rules preclude that. I’m opposed to an ‘activists’ democracy’ which excludes members from decisions such as these.

The grounds for excluding seem to be that members are uninformed, or are insufficiently active, or need to be led, or are atomised and subject to the propoganda of the dominant ideology, or something similar. I think this is elitist nonsense.

So it is a straight democratic issue. Of course, I oppose a boycott, too, and I think that the boycott proposal is unlikely to get a majority. But I could be wrong about both the normative and the predictive issue.

Not just an academic boycott, but what’s needed is a complete boycott of Israel; just don’t buy any Israeli products.

8: Well, not all that straight seeing as the question will necessarily be raised” “why this issue and not others?” – on what grounds will issues be referred back to membership ballots in the future?

Jon Pike said it is on the whole class of decisions to boycott academics for their home-countries’ politics. He explicitly gave three other examples. He also explained that his goal is to set a precedent for binding the union leadership more closely to the debate-and-ballot views of the members. The fact that the current system is “normal” doesn’t make it either odd or rude for someone to propose a peaceful mechanism to change it. The current system is, it seems, less in line with the values of academia, the realm in which the union operates.

Now, I’m not in the UCU or the UK so what Jon Pike and Chris Bertram wrote looks pretty straightforward. Which part bothers you – the idea of the annual boycott fracas, the idea of accountable unions, the idea that someone arguing about process is also open about goals – what is worrying?

Did you read the article, Engels? Perhaps you noticed that they are striking over wages and working conditions? That is what trade unions do in a democratic country, no? In democratic countries, trade unions do not take it upon themselves to set foreign policy, and when they do the democratically elected government stops them from doing so.

Wait, I’m arguing with a guy named Engels over what is democratic and what is not democratic? You could use that as a definition of wasted breath.

No, they’re talking about refusing to use assets that they are given by the public for the purpose the public has provided them. They are not talking about refusing to spend their own money on Israeli goods, which is what #9 is talking about. (If #9 doesn’t want to buy naval oranges or cut diamonds, more power to him or her).

If a bus conductor refused to allow an Israeli on the bus, he would lose his job. But somehow UCU members seem to think they own their universities and can exclude whoever they wish based solely on national origin. The arrogance is breathtaking – which I suppose is what you get when you cross an academic with a trade unionist.

But a union is not equal to a bus conductor, a union is equal to a union of bus conductors.

I suppose a union of bus conductors could decide to refuse a ride to the Israeli bus conductors until, say, the practice of sex-segregated buses is ended in Israel, no?

this has been highly divisive and controversial question

For sure, Professor, but that’s because it is – and it’s unlikely to go away, because Israel is neither likely to go away nor to cease behaving as it does nor to cease being based on a manifestly appalling premise nor to cease being resisted in a violent way.

So whether “thank God, we won’t be discussing that any more” is a useful position, I’m inclined to doubt. I can appreciate people don’t want to see academia, nor a union, torn apart over the issue of Israel (or any other issue) but if the question is made to go away then is that likely to be a good thing?

One can be a supporter (as am I) of a boycott or an opponent (as are you) but the question of a boycott will continue to exist while conditions for Israel’s victims remain as they are, since the question “what is to be done about Israel?” will necessarily suggest a boycott as a possible response.

I don’t want to suggest that the only reasons for opposing a boycott are those given by ENGAGE since plainly they are not. I do however think that to take the issue off the table will only benefit Israel, and the concern of Israel’s supporters that this should happen is a reflection of this fact. The outcome will be that the options regarding Israel remain only those that Israel’s supporters find acceptable and that Israel remains discussed as if it were a normal state. And it’s legitimate as far as ENGAGE is concerned to talk about who they are. Nobody who is not a member of ENGAGE is responsible for them or should be conflated with them, I agree. That sort of tactic is for Harry’s Place and their friends. And indeed ENGAGE.

This is not an issue where one might expect union activists to display a much higher degree of knowledge or competence than the average member, so there seems no good reason to for them to take the decision

Quite likely, but how should (or does) that work constitutionally?

Well, what it isn’t is stupid, though the habit of calling it that may be: it’s a tactic familiar from a previous situation, a parallel drawn by many far from stupid and far from inexperienced people. It is not a case we “therefore we must do this”, though, as I have observed before, the longer it remains the case that the boycott’s opponents fail to find anything more constructive then the less they can reasonably complain that people look to other options. Which may be why they tend to complain unreasonably and aggressively.

It is hard to think of anything that will not cause “extreme Israelis and their American supporters” (and indeed ENGAGE) to call down fire and brimstone on its proponents. Indeed the whole history of the Israel debate, during my adult life and presumably beforehand, is that the debate as such is not held and that attempts to have it are policed by ;

a. not permitting them ; or
b. demanding “why don’t you debate x instead ; or
c. calling people anti-Semites.

This will happen anyway – so I am not convinced by the idea that the boycott, especially, will provoke it. But you cannot have simply the debates you want.

I don’t know that I know you well enough to call you “Chris”. Can you propose an alternative?

The fact that “provides a rallying cry” argument is even included here suggests to me that the rest of them are probably very weak indeed.

Wasn’t there an “academic boycott” of South Africa in the eighties?

If you agree that “Israels treatment of the Palestinians has been monstrous”, why is an academic boycott now not a good tactic to reuse?

It seems to me like Chris’ objections can be leveled to any tactic used to put pressure on Israel.

Me, I think the petition is just fine as far as calculated political maneuvering goes; nothing’s wrong with that.

Though people opposing the petition (as a part of their calculated political maneuvering) will probably argue that the petition is counterproductive. And they certainly have a good reason to object to their position characterized as “absurd and undemocratic”. I can even imagine how some of them could use it as a rallying cry.

And why not the parts located in philosophy or literature departments? A well-reputed philosopher affected by the boycott might start applying more pressure on the government than she would’ve done otherwise. Or she might just leave the country causing a loss of prestige to the university and the the government; how’s that not pressuring?

The thing is Chris, you and I both know that this petition was not set up out of a great love for direct democracy within your union, but because the pro-Israel side couldn’t win using the normal, established structures for debate there.

So saying “the post was about how we resolve the question and in favour of resolving by allowing all members to vote on the issue” is silly. The question was resolved in favour of a boycott, but the pro-Israel side is taking their toys home and claiming it isn’t fair.

Just like you’re doing here: “it’s not fair that my posturing is being questioned waah”.

And hey, if you don’t want people commenting on your intra-union squabbles, don’t blog about them in a public forum.

Chris, have you ever considered a counter-proposal, where before the UCU boycotted Israel, it first had to boycott the US? (1) By size and scale the US government has committed far more numerous and widespread stupid, awful, destabilizing and counterproductive acts than Israel (2) There are many more interactions between US and UK academics, so a UCU decision would impact more members firsthand, people they know personally, conferences they were invited to in the States, etc. (3) That personal impact would make a boycott more credible, if the people who call for it absorb some of the costs themselves. (4) It would potentially embarrass the UK government into some sort of response, actually having a practical impact on policy. (5) It would be immune to the inflammatory fingerpointing associated with threats to sanction Israel. If successful, adding Israel to the boycott would be simple; if not, at least there would be a recent precedent.

Me: They are talking about holding a boycott, not “tak[ing] it upon themselves to set foreign policy” btw.

Bloix: No, they’re talking about refusing to use assets that they are given by the public for the purpose the public has provided them.

What do you mean “no”??? Are you seriously disagreeing with my statement above? Why?

And “refusing to use assets that they are given by the public for the purpose the public has provided them” is exactly what the IAA workers are doing in the article I linked.

Well, sg, white racist unionists in Australia – is that your best precedent? Of course unions have the power to do immoral and counter-productive things, and I suppose in this case the government would allow them to do it. But’s morally wrong, and it’s probably illegal as well, if there were a government or a private party with standing who would be willing to challenge it.

And, yes, Engels, I am disagreeing with you. The editor of an academic journal doesn’t own the journal. She is given a position of trust to produce the best journal she can. Within her field of expertise (translation studies, say) she has free rein to decide what to publish. But she was not hired to help resolve international disputes and she has no more professional expertise than a bus conductor in the Israel-Palestine dispute.

Her journal is a public journal, funded with public money to serve a useful social purpose. That purpose is not to right injustice overseas. It is to dissminate scholarship in the field of translation studies.

If in her personal life she decides to boycott Israeli goods by not buying oranges and not vacationing on the Red Sea, that is her right as a free citizen of a democracy.

If she decides to breach her obligation to produce the best journal she can by turning away qualified articles from Israeli academics and publishing second-best articles instead, then she is behaving both undemocratically and in violation of her contract of employment. She has confused her freedom to select the best and most important articles with personal ownership of the journal. If she cannot make this distinction, she deserves to be fired.

Bloix, I know you disagree with me. What I was objecting to was your habit of writing “no”, as if you had flatly refuted something I had said, when in fact all you had done was to ignore it, and then go on to write about a different aspect of the problem.

What you are arguing now—that academics have strong duties to be efficient employees which trump any ethical concerns about their collaborations—may or may not be convincing—personally, I don’t think it is—but it does not change the fact that the UCU are not “tak[ing] it upon themselves to set foreign policy”, and it is pretty silly to describe their proposed action in this way.

Bloix, what the hell do Czarist Russia and the Odessa workers have to do with anything? Apart from the fact that it is obnoxious to obsess about someone’s screenname (which may or not be a good guide to his views) instead of addressing anything he has said, do you even know who Engels was? (Hint: he didn’t take part in the Russian Revolution). And since I told you the last time I don’t support this boycott, in addition to being patronising

Now I understand how terrific it must feel to be at the vanguard with this Israel boycott stuff,

is either remarkably stupid or dishonest.

Engels, the last para was not addressed to you but to the hypothetical union leader who thinks that unions are at the vanguard. And the reference was to Battleship Potemkin, the movie – the point being that some members of the UCU seem to envision themselves as at the vanguard of a world-historical struggle and therefore not constrained by the norms of bourgeois democracy that apply to ordinary folk.

abb1 – When the T&G (the bus conductors union, among other things) voted to support a boycott of Israel this summer, they limited themselves to encouraging the membership not to buy Israeli goods. They were not so deluded as to believe that the union owns the buses and can decide who may or may not ride.

The members of the UCU, on the other hand, have a bizarrely bloated sense of their own importance. The librarians believe that they own the libraries and the lab techs think that they own the labs. This comes, I suppose, from a complete misunderstanding and abuse of academic freedom coupled with a fatal attraction of British trade unionism to left wing romanticism.

the last para was not addressed to you but to the hypothetical union leader who thinks that unions are at the vanguard. And the reference was to Battleship Potemkin, the movie – the point being that some members of the UCU seem to envision themselves as at the vanguard of a world-historical struggle and therefore not constrained by the norms of bourgeois democracy that apply to ordinary folk

It’s still a stupid thing to say, which substitutes your stereotypes of leftwingers for any attempt at argument. (Equally was your suggestion that because I mentioned academic “collaborators” I must be making some kind of veiled Nazi comparison, and your ill-informed comments about leftwing views on democracy above.) There are a lot more pleasant ways for me to spend me time then to wade through these kinds of stereotypes and smears, so I am not going to argue with you any further.

Danielle Day- sorry to be ignoring you. You’ve wandered into a the last moments of a furious food fight and you’re asking if the muffins are fresh. You can search the CT archives for israel boycott and read lots more about it from past posts and comment threads.

aab1 – we’re now in agreement that the proposed UCU boycott is the moral equivalent of stealing stuff. I leave it to you to persuade the sponsors of the proposed boycott to frame it in those terms.

Well, it turns out that Bertram has made an absolute fool of himself in believing that Pike and ENGAGE actually wanted a membership debate on the proposal. As they’re celebrating, it looks like what they actually wanted was that the membership not be allowed to discuss it at all.

Anybody actually interesteed in democracy should deplore this sort of thing: unions deploying lawyers to precent issues even being discussed.

I have a certain experience in this field: when I was an activist in CPSA years ago, the leadership used to do this all the time, bringing in lawyers to rule hundreds of motions to conference not only out of order but unfit to actually be printed. Yes, we couldn’t even read motions that had been submitted to our policy-making body (and in CPSA, we couldn’t even see the legal advice either).

Why don’t you know about this? Bluntly, because democracy is only considered to be an issue in the trade unions when it’s a stick with which to beat the left.

There’s a lot of fake-democrats about.

As it stands, of course, the effect of this legal advice (about which there is no reason to be uncynical – this issue has been debated several times before so where was the legal advice then?) is to institutionalise the equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. It is another contribution to the prevention of debate as referred to in #23 above.

May I point out that I have been arguing in threads on this site for over a year that the proposed boycott would likely be illegal. To me it has seemed plain as day that a union cannot utilize the assets of its member’s employers to conduct a campaign to change the policies of a foreign nation. Only the unbellievable arrogance of the academic community, which seems to have confused academic freedom with immunity from legal constraints, would allow anyone to come to a different conclusion.

And abb1 – it’s just extraordinary that you are arguing in favor of the legality of compliance with the Arab League boycott. Do you know anything about it? Obviously not. But ignorance has never stopped you yet.

abb1 – in a democracy the government sets foreign policy. The foreign policy of the US is that the Arab League boycott was not to be complied with. (You apparently think that the US should have permitted private companies to be coerced into refusing to trade with Israel. The government of the US had a different view.)

On the other hand, the government of the UK hasn’t decided to turn the public universities of the UK into a tool of foreign policy in connection with the Israel-Palestine conflict. It could do so, and perhaps someday it will do so. It hasn’t yet, and until it does, it’s not for a union of university employees to decide that it must do so. As you are not a stupid person I conclude that you do not want to understand the distinction. Perhaps you, like Engels, are nostalgic for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

First of all, criminalizing American companies disclosure of their connection with Israel to American citizens is not foreign policy, it’s a domestic policy. And second: it’s a policy as much Bolshevik as anything I can imagine.

On the other hand, the government of the UK hasn’t decided to turn the public universities of the UK into a tool of foreign policy in connection with the Israel-Palestine conflict. It could do so, and perhaps someday it will do so. It hasn’t yet, and until it does, it’s not for a union of university employees to decide that it must do so.

That’s interesting. So, the public universities are merely a tool of the government, to be used for all kinds of things including the foreign policy. Sounds like you’re not against a dictatorship per se, you’re just against a dictatorship of the proletariat. Or rather, I’m guessing here, against any dictatorship that might do something unpleasant to Israel; that’d be highly immoral. Is that right?