UCU Israel Boycott: Callinicos Sounds the Retreat

It is ironic that almost simultaneously with the UCU leadership and Sally Hunt declaring that a Boycott of Israeli Universities would be 'unlawful' that Prof. Alex Callinicos of the SWP had decided to sound the bugle of retreat....writes Tony Greenstein...

The UCU action was predictable. Like all trade union bureaucrats the last thing they want is controversy over solidarity action. Far better to close down debate altogether by obtaining a compliant barrister's (unpublished) opinion. What is surprising is that the SWP, which to date has been at the forefront of the Boycott movement has also decided to run for cover.

Firstly the decision of the UCU Executive to use the law to stifle debate and discussion in the union, which the Zionists of course have welcomed, none more so than the 'left' Zionists of Engage, is a tactical mistake on their part. Callinicos is right on one question. The call for a Boycott would have almost certainly been defeated since academics are not trade unionists in the traditional sense. Their former union AUT didn't originally even consider itself a trade union and has no history of militancy. Unlike the TGWU-Unite and UNISON it was always unlikely that a Boycott would be passed.

However the debate on a boycott, just as that over Apartheid in South Africa, which also took a long time to be accepted among academics, would itself have generated an unofficial boycott by sympathetically inclined academics. It would also have kept up pressure on Israeli academics to begin to raise the very real boycott of Palestinian students by Israel and their interference in their education. All this has of course been squashed by Sally Hunt's cowardice.

Of course a Boycott is a tactical question, however Callinicos in his article in the September 28 issue of Socialist Worker, didn't argue about how the Boycott call might be taken up or won or campaigned about, he was effectively arguing for its abandonment. And instead of an honest assessment about its chances he used the most dishonest of arguments, e.g. that many anti-Zionists are also opposed to a boycott. This is not true. He cites Chomsky and it is more an example of Callinicos's ignorance than anything else. Chomsky is not an anti-Zionist. Although he is certainly an anti-imperialist he has always shied away from any systematic critique of Israel, since he belongs to the old Brit Shalom school of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, which held that a binationalist solution was possible. Today Chomsky is an ardent supporter of a 2 States solution and is opposed e.g. to the right of return. It is symptomatic of the SWP's political degeneration that someone who knows nothing about Zionism should be the first to sound the retreat.

This is not the first example of Callinicos's cowardice. When Norman Finkelstein published the acclaimed Holocaust Industry, which analysed how the Zionist movement, with the support of the US establishment, had extorted reparations from the Swiss Banks and then used the money, as it had with Germany, for Zionist educational projects etc. rather than to support the holocaust survivors, as they had promised, Callinicos attacked Finkelstein as giving succour to holocaust deniers. In fact Finkelstein's courage in raising this subject, a courage praised by the late Raul Hilberg, was demonstrated recently as having been fully justified with demonstrations by holocaust survivors in Los Angeles and Israel against the poverty they are forced to endure whilst the Jewish Claims Conference Executives bask in luxury. Recently dismissed Chief Executive Rabbi Israel Singer claimed $2m expenses in the last year before being dismissed for corrupt practices.

The question as to how to take up the boycott will be the subject of a discussion at a Conference on the Boycott at the SOAS on 13th October.

Sun 30, September 2007 @ 21:57