BY NICK FREDMAN
What should be the response of workers in the higher education sector towards the Israeli occupation of Palestine? This question has been posed over the last several months by a petition circulated by two Australian academics calling for a "boycott of research and cultural links with Israel".
It is a particularly important question for union activists in the sector, as the most effective response would be a collective one. Should the National Tertiary Education Industry Union (NTEU) be supporting such a boycott, or seeking a different response?
The brutal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and systematic discrimination against Palestinians living within Israel itself, has caused immense suffering. Like all examples of national oppression, this has distorted all aspects of economic, social and cultural activity. As Rita Giacaman, a Palestinian scientist, argued in a letter to the British journal Nature, "the conditions of closure and siege have reduced our scientific endeavours to near-paralysis, leaving us unable to teach, let alone conduct research".
The Palestinian trade union movement has also suffered. The February bombing of the headquarters of the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions was condemned by unionists around the world, including ACTU president Sharran Burrow.
Disgust at this situation led the Australian National University's John Docker and Sydney University's Ghassan Hage to launch the boycott petition in June. They call for Australian academics "not to attend conferences in Israel; to pressure our universities to suspend any existing exchange or linking arrangements; and to refuse to distribute scholarship and academic position information".
Such petitions have been attacked as penalising people who are not necessarily responsible for the oppressive policies of the Israeli state. The petition writers recognise that "some academics and intellectuals oppose the government and some also are involved in cooperative Israeli-Palestinian research projects".
However, they then make the wholly irrelevant point that "the vast majority [of Israeli intellectuals] have either supported the current Israeli army onslaught on the Palestinians, or have failed to voice any significant protest against it".
Surely the point of any such bans and boycotts is not to inflict a blanket "collective punishment", however mild, on the members of the oppressor nation, but to target those really responsible for Israeli government policies (i.e., Israeli government officials), and to educate and help mobilise people in Australia in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Such were the aims of maritime workers' bans against Dutch shipping in the 1940s, which helped the Indonesian national independence movement defeat the Dutch colonial army while raising the need for international solidarity among working people here. The boycotts, bans and sanctions aimed against South Africa from the 1960s to the late 1980s were directed towards racist sporting and cultural institutions and the state and corporations that upheld apartheid.
Another problem with aiming to cut off cultural links with Israel is that this tactic can be seen as restricting free speech. Trade unions, progressive intellectuals and the left in general should be the most ardent defenders of free expression for all political forces, if we are to have any hope of winning working people to the project of radical change. Any other stance gives the right-wing — in this instance, the Zionists — the ability to muddy the issues by claiming their democratic rights are being repressed.
Docker and Hage should be commended for seeking to mobilise support for Palestinian national self-determination, but their approach needs serious amendment. A better approach could be to seek to ban activities which support in any way Israeli government, military and corporate interests. Also we should be demanding that Australian trade unions and the ACTU increase political and material support to the Palestinian trade union movement and the Palestinian people, and that Australian educational and cultural institutions increase support to similar institutions in Palestine.
[The author is a member of the national council of the NTEU].
From Green Left Weekly, September 4, 2002.
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