Boycott Israel?

The National Union of Students Conference takes place from 25-27 April in Brighton and, once again, we will be in attendance. It promises to be three days of constant campaigning, debating and flogging Solidarity and other publications. Malia Bouattia is re-standing for President against two right-wing candidates. While credit is due for her commitment to campaigning for a free and liberated education system, there remain many criticisms of her twelve months in office. The limpness of last November’s national demonstration indicates the union’s disengagement from grassroots organising. Workers...

I agree with Martin Thomas’s article (‘Jackie Walker, Momentum and Anti-semitism’, Solidarity 418) but I would like to make a few comments on the call, by the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, for a boycott of the Jewish Film Festival which Martin briefly mentions. Of all the areas for the “boycott Israel” movement to focus on, a Jewish film festival seems the least appropriate. Many Palestinian films have received support of one kind or another from either individual Israeli filmmakers and technicians or Israeli organisations. In fact in some cases these films simply would not have been made if it...

Last month the National Union of Students voted to support the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. This campaign has seen increases support by student unions around the country, but the controversial vote by the NUS is a major step forward for the BDS campaign. The regrettable rise of “boycott Israel” politics is due to a confusion that has developed on the left in general. BDS has increasingly come to be seen as a principle for activists rather than a tactic. To many, being a supporter of the Palestinian cause means supporting a boycott of Israel and vice versa. But of...

As we publish (29 July) over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 6,000 injured since Israel began its assault on Gaza on 8 July. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has just stated Israel’s military campaign will continue for some time, and that he has no intention of heeding calls for a ceasefire. The UN says 73% of the Palestinian fatalities are civilian, and over 200 are children. Some neighbourhoods have been destroyed, homes have been turned to rubble. Much of Gaza is now without electricity. Before the conflict Gaza was poor and isolated with over 40% living below the...

If you grew up in radical politics in the 1980s, anti-apartheid activism was ubiquitous — a reference point, an inspiration, and an accessible vehicle for campaigning. Demonstrating outside the South African embassy, attending cultural and political meetings and demanding freedom for Nelson Mandela were rites of passage across the spectrum of the left. The lessons of the anti-apartheid movement retain their contemporary relevance. Some within climate and anti-war campaigns have looked to it as a model. More widely, the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign has explicitly...

On Sunday 13 October, Independent Jewish Voices held a conference in London on the ongoing impasse in the Israel-Palestine conflict. IJV was set up in 2007 as an organisation of left-wing British Jews opposed to the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. It conceives of itself as a “counter-balance” to the official communal leadership of the conservative and staunchly Zionist Board of Deputies. The conference was held in Birkbeck, University of London, and attracted around a hundred people. The keynote speaker was Dr Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian physician and politician from the...

Stephen Hawking's decision not to attend an 18-20 June conference in Jerusalem has caused much celebration among advocates of an academic boycott of Israel. Hawking himself has made no statement on the issue, but the academic boycott campaign has published a letter from him to the organisers saying: "I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott". They claim it as a boost for their line that academics, writers, and cultural figures of all sorts should boycott Israel and Israelis across the board. Yet, as US professor Noam...

In the course of just a few days, three news stories came across my desk that highlighted one of the problems we face in the British trade union movement. As I write these words, the Israeli nurses’ union is engaged in a major fight with the Netanyahu government. Netanyahu is the health minister (as well as prime minister) and his government stands accused of starving public hospitals, while coming up with millions to construct new illegal settlement housing. The nurses strike deserves the support of unions everywhere, in particular unions which organise nurses. Israel’s public sector unions...

The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) met in Blackpool last week for what (with one exception) was a fairly quiescent special conference, with the union’s Executive Council carrying all the motions it proposed. Delegates discussed the continued loss of frontline firefighter jobs – over a thousand a year — and the impact these would have on emergency fire cover in local communities. There are a number of local disputes brewing over cuts. The union announced dates for five strikes in Essex, starting from 28 June in a long-running dispute about cuts to the service. The threat from privatisation and...

Why do some people think that campaigning in solidarity with the Palestinians is “a bit anti-Jewish”? This is the question (supposedly) addressed by an article in the spring newsletter of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC). There are many reasons why some people think that the dominant form of what passes for Palestinian solidarity is “a bit anti-Jewish” (or maybe rather more than just “a bit”). Some people may have found it “a bit anti-Jewish”, for example, when the SPSC marked Holocaust Memorial Day by reading extracts from a play (“Perdition”) which claimed that the Holocaust...