Judging from the world-wide outrage over the Association of University Teachers’ boycott of selected Israeli universities, it may well be that before very long it is lifted. But I am indebted to an assiduous reader for pointing out that what seems to have been forgotten is that the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, with which the AUT plans to merge, instituted its own much broader boycott of Israel three years ago, as it announced in this statement. This urged that

‘all UK institutions of Higher & Further Education be urged immediately to review - with a view to severing - any academic links they may have with Israel’

. As justification, the NATFHE spewed up one ignorant, prejudiced and venomous distortion about Israel after another.Thus it

•declared

‘Israel on balance has been the main aggressor in respect of the Palestinian population at large

’;

•compared Israel to apartheid South Africa, and in the war against Israel inverted aggressor and victim simply because Israel was a functioning state while the Palestinians had no state:

'Given that the Israelis have a functioning state, whose prosperity and security are underwritten by the world's only remaining superpower, and the Palestinians have no state, are economically impoverished and with their civil institutions and security structures, imperfect though these are, harassed and in recent weeks utterly crushed by the Israelis'

;

•sidestepped altogether the question ‘

Why pick on the Israel / Palestine conflict?

’ which indeed gets to the heart of its use of double standards;

•went so far as to acknowledge that ‘

No doubt the Palestinian Authority is far from perfect

’ but then made excuses for mass murder:

‘It must be recognised that the recent desperate actions of the suicide bombers come after more than 10 years, since the first intifada, of teenagers pitting themselves against the Israeli tanks and soldiers on their own streets armed only with stones, during which time the overwhelming number of casualties were young Palestinians - a pattern which continues to this day’

;

•only felt able to mumble ‘

we think not

’ when asked if this position wasn't encouraging antisemitism, but clearly wasn’t very sure — the nearest it approached to an honest statement in this whole farrago.

It expressed no outrage, of course, over the annihilatory wars, programme for genocide and ethnic cleansing and campaign of mass murder carried out by the Arabs against the Jews of Israel for the past half-century and against which Israel merely seeks to defend itself. In other words, this was the usual monstrous travesty of what has been happening in the Middle East, promulgated by people who are entrusted with the education of our young.

At one point, it claimed: ‘

NATFHE is not anti-Israel

’. Yet its statement appeared on the website of the Trade Union Friends of Palestine, each page of which is illustrated by a map. Look carefully at that map. It supposedly is an outline of ‘Palestine’. But it actually includes the State of Israel, which on this map — as is the case with all Palestinian maps and insignia — is not acknowledged as existing at all but instead is subsumed into ‘Palestine’. And as with all Palestinian maps, the meaning is clear. Israel, in the view of the TUFP, has no right to exist and the aim is to destroy it and colonise the Jewish state by a Palestinian one.

NATFHE is affiliated to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Its website (whose logo consists of the same map of ‘Palestine’ which eradicates and supersedes Israel) sports a picture of the NATFHE general secretary, Paul Mackney, making a speech at a conference held by the PSC and the TUFP on March 1 2003. Alongside this picture is the text of a conference statement which raves about Israel’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ and its inhuman treatment of the Palestinians, and declares for good measure: ‘

We believe that there is no equivalence between the actions of the occupying power, the Israeli state, and the Palestinian people whose lands are occupied

.’ By which it appears to mean that the mass murder of Israelis is ok, while Israeli self-defence against such mass murder is not.

A year later, however, NATFHE was clearly feeling a little bruised by unfavourable press comment about its boycott. At its annual conference in May 2003, a statement by General Secretary Mackney coyly referred to a

‘

…considerable amount of media interest in what has been referred to and discussed simplistically as a policy of ‘boycott’; we have taken the opportunity to explain that the policy has never been one of straightforward boycott, but that we believe UK institutions should maintain links with institutions and projects which help build a positive relationship between Israel and Palestine, contribute to the peace process or help build civil society in Palestine. In the light of changing circumstances the NEC on 2 May, decided that NATFHE should move on from the policy of ‘reviewing links’ enunciated in the April 2002 resolution, and to inform branches of this change of strategy.’

This 'change of strategy, however, amounted to little more than a tad less transparency about its obnoxious and continuing policy, since at the same time it

‘agreed to affiliate to the Trade Union Friends of Palestine and Palestine Solidarity Campaign’

which support a general boycott of Israeli goods.

NATFHE’s General Secretary Mackney himself deserves rather close attention. For he appears to be a radical political agitator of the first rank. He is a leading stop-the-war activist, who at the anti-Bush rally in November 2003 was introduced as ‘

one of the general secretaries who has been an absolute stalwart supporter of this movement

’. Note this wording. He was introduced not as an individual anti-Bush activist, but in his capacity as a paid official representing his union on that platform. NATFHE was therefore directly associated with the rabble-rousing extremism (and demonstrable idiocy) of his speech in which he said:

‘We're here to give Bush the push!... This is not a victory for democracy, its a victory for hypocrisy! This was not a war of liberation but a war of occupation! This was not to free Iraqi soil, but to get control of oil! Bush doesn't care about restoration, he wants privatisation with the contracts parceled out to his "project for new America" friends!’

What is a teachers' leader doing associating teachers with such extremism? Are NATFHE members entirely happy about this? Did they even know?

Moreover, it turns out that Mackney is not just any old anti-Bush activist. In February 2003, he used a Stop the War Coalition press conference to call for workers’ strikes against the war:

‘It is not appropriate for us today to issue a specific call to industrial action." But the day war started could see "massive protests in every industry against it", he warned. "Unless Blair changes course Blair will fall on this," he said.’

As it turned out, there were no such strikes. But Mackney’s posturing reveals that here is a serious throwback to those far-off days when the workers united would never be defeated. Indeed, the most extreme far-left groupuscules appear to regard him as a grand revolutionary fromage. Workers’ Power, described as the British Section of the Fifth International, referred to him as one of the three leading anti-war trade union organisers:

‘That is why we need to pile the pressure onto the anti-war union leaders, like Paul Mackney of Natfhe and Bob Crow of the RMT and Mick Rix of Aslef, to make a clear and unambiguous call to strike against the war. These men have called for strikes. But they have also insisted that their unions cannot call them. The TUC, said Mackney, on 22 March, should be organising strike action. But it isn't - and at this stage it won't.’

While Marxist.com hailed Mackney — who was recently elected to the TUC council with the third largest vote cast — as one of the new breed of radical left trade union leaders who would reshape mass industrial and political organisations into ‘

organs of militant struggle and social change

’.

No greater compliment, clearly, could there be. And this colossus of militancy is now heading to become the union leader who is to represent all our custodians of higher and further teaching and learning. To repeat – the AUT plans to merge with the NATFHE to make one union for all teachers in the universities and institutions of further education. So the world of elevated scholarship is to be represented by a man who is one of the key revolutionary socialist agitators in Britain, a ranting demagogue who has no scruple in associating the universities directly with an attempt to bring the country out on strike as a political attack on the governments of Britain and America, and who has spearheaded in the Israel boycott a vicious, ignorant and prejudiced assault on academic freedom of expression and the monstrous victimisation of those who are fighting an attempt to exterminate them – and victimised precisely because they are fighting it.

If I were a member of the AUT, I would not just be trying to overturn its disgusting Israel boycott. I would be trying to stop this merger, before the common rooms of academe become the battlegrounds of a not-yet-defunct and still highly toxic class war.

Posted by melanie at May 9, 2005