British Teachers End Israel Ban

Britain’s largest union of university teachers Thursday backed off its month-old boycott of two Israeli universities, one of which had been accused of suppressing pro-Palestinian research and the other of taking part in the occupation of Arab land.

The decision to cut ties by the 48,000-member Assn. of University Teachers had sparked charges of anti-Semitism and widespread criticism that professors in Britain had no business interfering in Israeli-Palestinian politics.

The cancellation came after some union members protested that the boycott had been engineered by a small coterie of members without broad consultation or due process.

The British and Israeli governments welcomed the move.

“We thank all those British academics who acted to cancel what was a very one-sided and extremist resolution,” said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev. “We believe the way to reconciliation is through dialogue -- definitely not through boycotts.”

“The British government believes that the best way we can help achieve a peaceful resolution in the region is to encourage both sides to take steps necessary for progress through close engagement,” Kim Howells, a minister in the British Foreign Office, told the Reuters news agency.

“We do not believe sanctions and boycotts help toward that aim,” Howells said.

Sue Blackwell, a Birmingham University lecturer in English who had been the leading force in the original boycott resolution, told the BBC: “The struggle goes on. This is the end of the beginning.... We won the moral argument. They just won the vote.”

The boycott called on union members to sever links and avoid cooperation or shared projects with the universities, aside from individual faculty members who conscientiously opposed Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.

The measure had affected Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities, and there had been a proposal before the union’s executive council to include Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The teachers group had accused Haifa of threatening to dismiss a political science lecturer who was overseeing research seen as critical of the military occupation of Palestinian lands.

Bar-Ilan was targeted for maintaining ties to the College of Judea and Samaria, a Jewish school set up in West Bank territories Israel occupied after the 1967 Middle East War. In an indignant reaction to the boycott, the Israeli Cabinet raised the college to the status of a university and promised to increase state support.

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the Assn. of University Teachers, announced the vote to rescind the boycott after a meeting in London that was closed to reporters.

The union said only that the decision-making was lengthy and involved “deeply held views on both sides.”

Jon Pike, a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University and an opponent of the boycott, said the vote to rescind passed “absolutely decisively.”

Robert Fine, a Warwick University professor and the chairman of Engage, a group of union members who had petitioned for the vote, called it “a very good day for defeating what seems to me to be the worst of all worlds: politics that on one hand penalizes Israel ... and on the other really offers nothing whatsoever to Palestinians.”

A statement sent to newspapers by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center expressed relief at the decision. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an official there, called it “the end of one skirmish in the ongoing war to delegitimize the Jewish state.”

Times staff writers Janet Stobart in London and Laura King in Jerusalem contributed to this report.