This TUC boycott has morphed into bigotry
This TUC boycott has morphed into bigotry
Discriminating against Israelis in the name of the Palestinian cause hurts any progressive agenda for a negotiated peace
By Daniel Taub
An NHS conference on conflict resolution for managers and union representatives has turned into a sobering lesson in how conflicts are decidedly not resolved. The guest lecturer at the conference, organised by the Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust, was to be Moty Cristal, an expert in negotiation theory and mediation. But under pressure from one of the participating unions, Unison, his invitation was unceremoniously withdrawn. The reason? He is an Israeli.
At no stage, it should be emphasised, was any concern raised about Professor Cristal himself. He is, by all accounts, an expert in his field. He has lectured around the world and in the UK, including to the Muslim Council of Britain, and has been an active participant in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and back-channel dialogue. It was his Israeli nationality alone, he was informed, which made his participation "unacceptable given Unison and TUC policy on the Middle East conflict".
This is not the first time a supposedly political boycott has seamlessly morphed into bigotry and prejudice. When two Israeli academics were "unappointed" from the editorial boards of journals at Manchester University, – again purely on the grounds of their citizenship – one of them, Gideon Toury, observed wryly: "I was appointed as a scholar and unappointed as an Israeli."
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A current example is the campaign to press the Globe Theatre to withdraw an invitation to the Habima theatre company, the oldest Hebrew language theatre group in the world, from performing as part of the World Shakespeare Festival accompanying the London 2012 Olympics. Of the 37 participating theatre companies, Habima is the only one subject to such a call. Yet Habima, with its cast of Arab and Jewish actors, and a repertory which repeatedly challenges Israeli establishment dogmas, is precisely the kind of voice that progressives should be supporting, rather than undermining.
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