17 January 2007: Engage and the Alliance for Workers' Liberty

One of the candidates in the campaign to become next General Secretary of the education union UCU Roger Kline has posted on his blog criticism of a certain 'campaign' called Engage (which I've blogged on previously, see below), and which is attempting in its usual meretricious fashion to intervene in the elections. Kline has distanced himself from moves by the UCU left to encourage its members, teaching in UK universities, to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Engage, being supposedly a single issue campaign to oppose such a boycott, finds itself in a pickle. The website opposes a boycott, Kline opposes a boycott: surely, the site should applaud Kline's stance? The problem, of course, is that all Engage's links are with the union right, which is not surprising given Engage's role in cheer-leading for the military occupation in Palestine.

Engage has to distance itself from Kline: to do so it requires some extraneous justification. It solves this delightful problem by posting at length about how every group in the history of British Marxism has been anti-semitic: from the Communist Party (of which Kline's grandfather was a member) to the International Socialists, the fore-runner of today's SWP (Kline was briefly a member of the IS, and then later a member of another far-left group, the 'soft Maoists' of Big Flame). Sally Hunt, Kline's rival in the election, is not known to be any group's 'ex'. Roger, whose candidacy Engage opposes in the elections is a Jew, Sally, who they endorse, isn't.

By always analysing other people's history, but never acknowledging its own, Engage, delightfully, is concealing its own past. Its dominant personality David Hirsh admits to being an 'ex' himself, although will not say of what (Workers' Hammer, I guess?), while Hirsh's second in command Jon Pike was for many years a follower of the Alliance of Workers Liberty, and on the AWL website engages in a polemic with another member of that group Martin Thomas as to whether Engage was conceived by the AWL or is only incidentally an AWL front organisation.

[Incidentally, if any readers have doubts about my own political pedigree they should look here, here, here and here.]

I've written before about the openness of some members of Workers' Liberty to the new racisms, I've also written previously about Alan Johnson, another AWL-ex who now uses the web to promote Tony Blair's war in Iraq. There is a useful recent piece by Tony Greenstein on that organisation in the current issue of What Next. 

The AWL in their current incarnation remind me of nothing so much as the Living Marxism of the early 1990s: a party that inhabits the left in order to oppose it. 

30 May 2006: why the boycott motion passed

Many readers of this website will know that I work for the lecturers’ union NATFHE. I don’t often blog about my work there, but in the last few days and weeks, I along with many other NATFHE employees have been receiving a steady stream of hatemail, which I think deserves to be shared, and which I think can be used to explain why NATFHE members voted yesterday for a motion calling for a boycott of Israeli institutions.

The story began with a perfectly balanced article in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, drawing readers’ attention to the fact a motion at this year’s annual NATFHE conference comes close to calling for a boycott of Israeli universities.

Here’s the motion: ‘198C Academic Responsibility. Conference notes continuing Israeli apartheid policies, including construction of the exclusion wall, and discriminatory educational practices. It recalls its motion of solidarity last year for the AUT resolution to exercise moral and professional responsibility. Conference instructs the NEC to facilitate meetings in each university and college, and to circulate information to Branches, offering to fund the speakers' travel costs. Conference invites members to consider their own responsibility for ensuring equity and non-discrimination in contacts with Israeli educational institutions or individuals, and to consider the appropriateness of a boycott of those that do not publicly dissociate themselves from such policies.’

The Haaretz piece led to a number of aggressive posts on the newspaper’s own website, which readers can judge for themselves by following the link above (the most polite one is the last, suggesting that Palestinian institutions be boycotted instead).

The article was also then picked up by the website Engage, which describes its mission as being ‘to fight against proposals to boycott Israeli academics’. Journalists began telephoning members of NATFHE at home, and we began to receive hatemail at NATFHE HQ, typically from Belgian, American or French email addresses.

For example, one person wrote to us with an email titled simply ‘anti-semmites’: ‘Soon little assholes like you people will get your daughters and wives raped by Arab scum. Serves you right you bunch of Jew haters. How's that whole ‘youth’ riot thing going?’

Some emails were more measured: 'If you and other white people will consider their centuries-old exploitation, murder, occupation, forceful conversion and enslavement of the non-white world, including Africa, India, Arabs, Jews, African-Americans, Native Americans, Vietnamese, etc., then and only then might you, British academics and churches speak and preach of what the Israeli state should do.'

Another wrote: ‘Your organisation is a fascist Nazi antisemitic organisation. Wait till we Jews throughout the world start boycotting British universities. There are 3 times more Jewish nobel prize winners than British ones. No wonder London is now Londonstan and is gradually going down the drain. Take care of your wrotten teeth and don't forget your dental appointments’.

In the aftermath of the vote, I'm sure that NATFHE members will be criticised: why condemn Israel now? And it's true: relatively few British papers are reporting the Israeli army's rocket attacks on Gaza, the continuing misery in the refugee camps, the mundane horror of the conflict, in which at least 100 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the year alone. It would indeed have been far easier to pretend that the conflict was 'normalised', off the TV screens, and in that sense 'over'.

That's why I think the hatemail played such an important part: in reminding those who have no sight of it of the attitude of most pro-Israelis towards the Palestinians.

I have no doubt that when organisations such as Engage boasted of having persuaded more than 4000 'academics' worldwide to sign an anti-boycott petition, they had in mind correspondents such as those I've quoted above. 

None of the senders seemed to be aware that NATFHE is a democratic institution. Staff don’t decide policy, members do. (The one NATFHE employee who was allowed to speak in the debate was the General Secretary - and he spoke against the motion.) I didn't even go to this year’s conference. Most recipients were administrators and organisers: people who could not contribute to the debate. Why harass them? 

Of course, the bulk of the hatemail was addressed to NATFHE staff, but members received some of it as well, and I doubt that they were impressed by it. 

The Engage campaign - I suspect - successfully toughened up a wavering majority; persuading them to move from the undecided to the pro-boycott camps.