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I’m speechless, but happy. Unlike any other Western country, boycotting Israel seems to be a healthy-contagious among UK organizations these days. After the journalists, doctors and couple of days ago, the top UK architects, UK professors’ union votes to boycott Israel.

The general secretary Sally Hunt urged delegates not to support the boycott call because she did not believe the majority of UCU members supported an academic boycott of Israel. But she was wrong:

Academics have backed calls for a wide-ranging debate on a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

The University and College Union (UCU) was urged, at its annual conference, to consider the “moral implications” of links with Israeli universities.

The motion condemned Israel for its “denial of educational rights” for the Palestinian people.

The union heard that “universities were to Israel what the Springboks were to South Africa”.

‘Barbaric’

Philosophy lecturer at Brighton University Tom Hickey, who proposed the motion, described the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories as “barbaric”.

“What are we to do with this? Are we to look away? If we do we make ourselves complicit in it.”

He claimed that only a “handful of academics had separated themselves from collusion with the occupation”, adding that justice must not be limited to home.

[..snip..]

While the Israeli university was functioning well, the Palestinian university he saw had been closed for 51 consecutive weeks because of arrests and incursions by Israeli forces, he claimed.

“Israeli academic freedom comes at the cost of the denial of the most basic of academic freedoms of Palestinian students,” he added.

[..snip..]

Delegates backed the motion in a card vote by 158 votes to 99, with 17 abstentions.

A full debate on the issue is now expected within UCU branches throughout the country, with the hope that a vote on a formal boycott may be held at the union’s conference next year.

If a boycott was to be agreed upon it might mean UCU members being urged not to attend conferences at Israeli universities or submit articles to their journals, he said. (Source: BBC)

As I mentioned yesterday, Zionists are very upset by this chain of planned U.K. boycott of Israeli labor unions. An Israeli Professor of Haifa University called the people who organized this boycott as “working for the forces of evil.”

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