As casualties mount in Gaza, criticism mounts at home over union president Sid Ryan’s call for an academic boycott on Israel. Advocates deem the boycott an effective way to influence the Israeli government, while critics argue the move unfairly targets Israeli professors for nothing more than their nationality.
Ryan is the head of CUPE Ontario, a union representing public sector workers. The union’s University Workers Coordinating Committee will bring a motion “supporting an boycott of Israeli academic institutions to protest the bombing assault on Gaza and, in particular, the bombing of the Islamic University on December 29, 2008,” reads the CUPE boycott resolution. “CUPE Ontario is taking this action in response to an appeal from the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees.”
How exactly such a boycott would be carried out is uncertain. The resolution names some possibilities, including refusing to participate in conferences at Israeli universities and advocating for suspension of funding and subsidies for Israeli institutions. If the proposal passes a vote in February, it goes to CUPE members for approval in May as the union asks Ontario universities to adopt its measures. CUPE-O passed a similar resolution in 2006, followed by the U.K.’s National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, Britain’s largest union of university teachers.
Many critics cite the potential divisiveness of such a move. “It serves no useful purpose. It’s incredibly divisive generally speaking, and then when you bring it into a campus environment it certainly doesn’t promote dialogue,” argues Daniel Silverman, program associate at U of T Hillel. “It really flies in the face of everything a university environment should be.” Silverman noted the diverse fields Israeli professors represent and challenged the usefulness of cutting off potential academic contributors.
Franklin Bialystok, a U of T Jewish Studies professor whose concentrations include modern Israeli history, also objects to the boycott. “Where was CUPE Ontario when Hamas was deploying 8,000-plus missiles against civilian settlements? Or on human rights violations in China and during the genocide in Darfur?”
Activists like Science for Peace president Judith Deutsch, who was among 10 Jewish women who attempted to enter and occupy the Israeli consulate last Wednesday, are in favour of the boycott. Deutsch sees it as a way to effectively pressure the Israeli government without hurting the general population economically. Deutsch allies herself with Israeli academics like Ilan Pappé, formerly of Haifa University and now on the University of Exeter faculty, who supported the boycotts in Britain.
“Many others have felt that [boycott] might be one of the only things that people in Israel would respond to, in terms of the government and the powers that be that seem so impervious to criticism,” she said. Science for Peace has drafted a petition, stating that they “condemn in the strongest terms the flagrant violations of the right to education and the academic freedom of our colleagues and their students in Gaza and the West Bank,” calling for signatures from fellow teachers.
Nonetheless, said Bialystok, the boycott applies special standards to Israel, out of the context of human rights issues in the Middle East. “CUPE Ontario [fails to mention] the oppression of workers in the rest of the Arab and most of the Islamic countries, the treatment of women, the prohibitions against unions, the violations against the rights of women and homosexuals […] While there is much to criticize about Israeli policy, it isn’t constructive to distort the situation.”
Despite the barrage of criticism, Ryan has stood by his proposal. “Academic freedom goes both ways,” he said, “What we are saying is if they want to remain silent and be complicit in these kinds of actions, why should they enjoy the freedom to come and teach in other countries like Canada?” Ryan has, however, apologized for comparing the bombing of Gaza’s universities to Nazi atrocities.
