Café Crema: “We’re not anti-semitic but…”

"Jews are as welcome here as anyone else."

Bob From Brockley writes:

I went for lunch at the cafe I often frequent, Cafe Crema in New Cross, and found the blackboard no longer says “Please boycott Israeli goods. Thank you.” It now says “We do not use any Israeli products. We are not anti-semitic but anti-fascist. Jews are as welcome here as anyone else.” So now, in my world, Israel is not just bad, it’s bad and fascist.

The owner of Café Crema writes:

Cafe Crema is my cafe. In response to a couple of other postings: yes; Israel is fascist in terms of its treatment of the Palestinians. It is an occupying force which does not carry out its responsibilities under the Geneva Convention. I’ve spent time in the West Bank and seen it first-hand. Anybody else posting comments on this blog been there? Added to this, we all know that they keep a million and a half Palestinians in a prison-camp called Gaza and proceed to exterminate them at will (in the name of self-defense; the Germans also had to defend themselves against the French Resistance, and the Apartheid regime of South Africa against the ANC). We do not currently promote boycotts of other rightwing/militaristic regimes because, in most cases (a) you do not generally see their goods in the shops and (b)they do not have such a history of support from the British establishment. When the South Africa boycott was underway in the 1980s, did anyone complain that there were lots of other nasty regimes in the world that we should have been targeting?

David Hirsh writes:

Chris says, “I’m not antisemitic but…”

“Jews are as welcome here as anyone else…” [But...]

I teach at Goldsmiths and I go to Cafe Crema every now and then. Perhaps you’d recognize me.

I liked the atmosphere. I went there sometimes with students and sometimes with colleagues and sometimes alone.

I liked the coffee too.

I felt comfortable there.

But now I don’t feel as though I’m welcome there anymore, in spite of the sign which says that Jews are welcome. Or perhaps because of that sign.

I’m not Israeli, I hold a British passport. Why? Because my grandparents on my father’s side escaped from Eastern Europe to Britain (before the 1905 immigration Act tried to construct a British boycott of European Jews); and my mother escaped from Germany to Britain in 1938.

Lots of members of those 2 families never got out of Europe. Some who did went to Chile, some went to Israel, some went to the US.

What is my point? My point is that I am British and not Israeli only for contingent reasons. I am British and not Israeli or Chilean or American by chance.

My cousins, who are Israeli, are Israeli by chance. Because that is where they found refuge when they were defined, in Europe, as shit, as cockroaches, and hunted down.

And your distinction between boycotting Israeli goods and Israeli people is a cowardly one.

If an Israeli grows tomatoes, you won’t buy her tomatoes for use in your Cafe. But if she turns up here wanting to spend her “fascist” shekels in your cafe, shekels which she earned by selling her tomatoes, then you will let her in.

You will exclude her tomatoes. But you would be too shy to exclude her. Why? Because you would feel that an exclusion of Israeli Jews would be antisemitic.

If you want to boycott Israeli goods then you will have to boycott me too.

And when my colleagues suggest lunch there or my students suggest coffee there, I guess I’ll just mumble, or say I’m busy, and I won’t be able to go with them because I am no longer part of the Cafe Crema community. I probably won’t tell them the real reason for fear that they’ll think I’m a paranoid Jew.

And when I walk past Cafe Crema twice a day, every day, on my way to and from work, I will be made to remember, even if I have forgotten, that there is the cafe where “Jews are welcome” and I will feel upset, excluded, and angry.

Do you understand, Chris? Every day when I walk past Cafe Crema I will see the cafe from which I feel excluded because I’m Jewish.

(By the way, Yes, I have spent time in the West Bank – I have been arguing and campaigning for an independent Palestinian state and for an end to the occupation for decades – but this has nothing to do with a campaign to exclude Israelis and/or their products from SE14)

UPDATE: on March 20th – Chris replied in more depth on Bob From Brockley:

Fair enough, I can now see that it was a mistake to write ‘Jews are as welcome here as anyone else’ in that it has been taken, by many people, in exactly the opposite way that it was intended (but perhaps I should have foreseen that – I apologise). Obviously, whilst writing anything about boycotting Israel (I’ll come to that in a bit) I wanted to also state what is obvious to me: that that doesn’t mean we’re anti-Semitic. I only felt that needed stating because certain people (such as Israeli politicians and pro-Israeli journalists) deliberately try to muddy the water by conflating anti-Israeli sentiment with anti-Semitism. I don’t care (and obviously generally don’t know) what community/religion/race/diaspora our customers come from – however in answer to the comment about taking fascist shekels, we would never knowingly serve a member of the BNP – and, in terms of individual Israelis, I don’t blame anyone for the misdeeds of their government, in the same way that I would hope that no one would hold me responsible for the misdeeds of British governments, past and present.

But we will continue to boycott Israel, and we certainly won’t hide the fact. All the time that we’ve been open, there have been stickers on the walls calling for a boycott. To me, it’s as legitimate as boycotting South Africa was in the 1980s [By the way, we don’t use Columbian coffee beans, we use Fairtrade Brazilian beans]. It doesn’t mean that I am a supporter of Hamas. It just means that I am more than a little frustrated with seeing absolutely no progress in favour of the Palestinian people, despite decades of handwringing by Western governments (and by progressive/leftwing Israelis). The walls, roadblocks, checkpoints and settlements continue to go up; the mass-killings, collective punishments, arbritrary arrests and incarcerations carry on, as the ineffectual UN resolutions continue to be passed.

I don’t see Hamas as being comparable to the WWII French Resistance, but I do see the Intifada in general as being so. It’s a popular uprising against a hated, and militarily far superior, occupying force. You cannot cite Palestinian suicide bombings and rocket attacks as being anywhere near the same league as what has been meted out by Israel; they don’t amount to 1 per cent of the total carnage and misery. Israel needs to think about why so much of the world is against it, in the same way that the USA has started to do in recent years (we boycotted them, too – and we had a notice up about it, but no complaints or counter-boycotts, as far as I’m aware – while Bush was in power; looks like it worked).

I am well aware of the Holocaust (my wife’s stepfather was in a concentration camp as a child) and the unjust treatment and displacement of Jews in general, in much of the world, for centuries. But these facts do not give Israel a licence to kill and oppress, or to steal land, anymore than the legacy of British colonialism gives Robert Mugabe excuses for his behaviour, despite what he might say.

And, Contentious Centrist, I’d like you to tell me exactly what my ‘ill-concealed wishes’ are, and why on earth I would feel ‘anguish …as a result of so many Jews feeling welcome in [my] cafe.’ The Jewish person who works at Café Crema certainly appears to feel welcome, and this doesn’t cause me much anguish. And this is not ‘gestural politics’. This is absolutely sincere.

Once again, to anyone I’ve offended, or made feel unwelcome, I apologise. However, the boycott remains. I’m genuinely sorry if this means we’ll lose certain customers; that’s obviously not our intention.

http://brockley.blogspot.com/2009/03/weekending.html?showComment=1237567320000#comment-c8787148451795961813

What do antisemites write on the windows of Jewish shops?

From Bob From Brockley

c. 1940: "Palestine Calls. Jews are not tolerated in Norway"

“Seven Jewish Children” on NY radio

Read David Adler.

Hope not hate – stand up for Manchester

By email from Hope Not Hate

I’ve just got back from the Hope not Hate launch event at Manchester Cathedral – where I was joined by three Bishops, representatives of other faiths and a Holocaust survivor.

At the event I announced that we’ve set a target of recruiting 2500 supporters in Manchester in the next 48 hours.

Within minutes, new supporters started to flow in.

But I need your help to make this goal – I want 1000 of our supporters to invite their Manchester based friends, family and collegues to join the campaign. And I’d like you to be one of the first to do it -

http://action.hopenothate.org.uk/hopeformanchester

It’ll only take you a minute or so and you’ll be helping us build the campaign in Nick Griffin’s target region – the front line in our battle against racism and hate. The campaign’s already taking shape in Manchester – and with your help we’ll be adding thousands of new supporters in the next few hours.

Please invite your friends to join the campaign now -

http://action.hopenothate.org.uk/hopeformanchester

Manchester is going to be an important target for the BNP – and Nick Griffin will undoubtedly generate a lot of press coverage. But we’ll win if we organise – and with your help we’ll do just that. Let’s not let up on the BNP and let them in through the back door. Get your friends involved in our Manchester campaign -

http://action.hopenothate.org.uk/hopeformanchester

Thanks for all that you’re doing – we’re building something quite special.

Jonathan Freedland on AIPAC and the myth of the “Israel Lobby”

Jonathan Freedland

This piece, by Jonathan Freedland, is from The Guardian.

Now they have their Joan of Arc. Those who have long claimed that the sinister, shadowy forces of “the Israel Lobby” pull the strings of US foreign policy at last have a martyr. Last week Charles Freeman, a former diplomat, said he would not take the job he had been offered, chairing the US National Intelligence Council: he had, he said, been the victim of a campaign of “character assassination” conducted by an “Israel Lobby [willing to] plumb the depths of dishonour and indecency”. In a furious statement, he declared that the “aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process”.

Those who in 2006 lapped up the thesis argued by the US academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, attributing to the mighty lobby the power to divert the US from its own interests, seized on Freeman’s fall as decisive proof. Walt himself declared: “For all of you out there who may have questioned whether there was a powerful ‘Israel lobby’,” he blogged, “think again.”

As the reception to the original Mearsheimer-Walt article showed, this is radioactive terrain. Those who wade in carelessly can find themselves burnt. The explanation is not complicated. The notion that Jews wield excessive power, and do so in mysterious ways; that they advance the interests of a foreign power; that they function as some kind of fifth column, and that as such they have often led their country into needless wars – all these are accusations that have been hurled at Jews going back many centuries. It should be no surprise that Jews’ ears prick up if they think they can hear these old tunes hammered out once more.

And yet, after several conversations with Israel supporters in both Washington and Tel Aviv, I have found no one who denies that Freeman was indeed the victim of advocates for Israel. It is quite true that many on Capitol Hill disliked Freeman’s devotion to Saudi Arabia, the country where he had once served as US ambassador: he recently suggested King Abdullah be renamed “Abdullah the Great”. True, too, that a critical blow came from Nancy Pelosi, the house speaker, reportedly outraged by Freeman’s overly indulgent attitude towards China’s rulers. But I’m reliably told that these lines of attack originated with the pro-Israel crowd. Nor have Freeman’s character assassins bothered to hide their fingerprints.

On the contrary, several have bragged about their role, among them Steve Rosen, a former official of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, who launched the attack on Freeman.

Surely, then, as Walt claimed, this settles not only the Freeman whodunit but the larger question of the mighty “Lobby”. Clearly it is every bit as vicious – and effective – as its detractors have claimed, able to derail even a new and popular administration such as Barack Obama’s simply because it had the temerity to pick a man who had, among other things, condemned the Israeli occupation as “brutal oppression” – right? Not quite.

The flaws in the Mearsheimer-Walt case remain as visible as when they were exposed by the Palestinian-American scholar Joseph Massad, Noam Chomsky and a clutch of other anti-Zionists. For one thing, if Israel and its backers really did control United States foreign policy, there would never be any divergence between them: Washington would simply do “the Lobby’s” bidding. But that is hardly the case. One can go back to the mid-1980s, when Israel and its friends begged the Reagan administration not to sell Awacs surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia – to no avail: the Saudis got their planes. Or spool forward to 1991 when George Bush pressured Israel to attend a peace conference against its will and withheld $10bn in much-needed loan guarantees unless Israel agreed to freeze settlements on occupied land. You might mention Israel’s proposed arms sales to China: Washington compelled Israel to back down, first in 2000 and again in 2005. More awkwardly, Israel has long sought the release of those who spied for it against the US. Washington has consistently refused.

Chomsky asks a useful question. If the US has been led to behave the way it does in the Middle East by the cunning “Israel Lobby”, how come it behaves the same way elsewhere? “What were ‘the Lobbies’ that led to pursuing very similar policies throughout the world?” As for the Middle East, Chomsky quotes the scholar Stephen Zunes: “There are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does Aipac [or the Lobby generally], such as the oil companies, the arms industry and other special interests whose lobbying influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted Zionist lobby …”

The naive assumption at work here is that the American dog has no interests of its own, leaving it free to be wagged by the pro-Israel tail. It’s a convenient view, casting the great superpower as a hapless, and essentially innocent, victim. But guess what: the US emphatically does have its own strategic interests – oil chief among them – and it guards them fiercely. Support for Israel as a loyal, dependable ally – ready to take on Arab and other forces that might pose a threat to those interests – has served America’s purposes well. That’s why the US acts the way it does, not because Aipac tells it to.

Perhaps the most powerful example – if only because so many believe the reverse to be true – is the Iraq war. Plenty of Mearsheimer-Walt followers reckon it was the “Lobby” wot done it: it was Israel that pushed for war. But as Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, and others have explained, Israel’s leaders in fact repeatedly warned against an attack on Saddam, fearing it would distract from, and embolden, what it regarded as the real threat, namely Iran. As it happened, they were right.

So the myth of an all-powerful Israel lobby, pulling the strings, is a delusion. But it’s equally false to pretend that Aipac and its allies don’t exist or exert genuine influence. They do and they play hardball, as the Freeman affair has vividly demonstrated. (Indeed, the negative publicity that has resulted may make this victory a pyrrhic one.)

Viewed this way, clearly and through a lens unclouded by exaggeration and mythology, they are to be strenuously opposed. Their attempt to limit the voices heard in Washington is not just an offence against pluralism, it also hurts the very cause Aipac purports to serve: Israel.

Aipac’s approach – not so much pro Israel as pro the Israeli right wing – ends up pushing US politicians away from the policies Israel itself needs, specifically the dialogue with enemies and territorial concessions that are necessary if Israel’s long-term future is to be secured.

The good news is that alternatives are emerging. Founded last year, J Street styles itself as a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” advocacy organisation, thereby creating a space for those US politicians who support Israel but believe the policy of recent Israeli governments is hurting Palestinians and imperilling the future of the Jewish state. Aipac and its allies have had the monopoly on Israel advocacy for too long. Let’s hope the Freeman episode prompts America’s leaders to take a hard look at them, to see them as they really are: not all-powerful – and not always right either.

This piece, by Jonathan Freedland, is from The Guardian.

Is it counterproductive to say that the boycott would be an antisemitic policy?

Geras on Fish.

Seven Muslim Children

Letter in the Irish Times:

Madam, – I’m going to write a short play, and the title will be “Seven Muslim Children”. It’s going to be a “10-minute history of Islam” and will consist of a series of short dialogues in which Muslim parents, teachers and clerics teach their children to hate. They teach them to hate the West, to hate Jews, to hate globalisation, to hate democracy, to hate everything except Islam. No entrance fee will be charged, but viewers should make a donation to a charity for children orphaned by 9/11.

I wonder if the Abbey would be interested in staging it. – Yours, etc,

JONATHAN BAUM,

Blackrock,

Co Dublin.

Radio 4 and Seven Jewish Children – David Hirsh

Howard Jacobson describes Seven Jewish Children as an antisemitic work:

“Caryl Churchill will argue that her play is about Israelis not Jews, but once you venture on to “chosen people” territory – feeding all the ancient prejudice against that miscomprehended phrase – once you repeat in another form the medieval blood-libel of Jews rejoicing in the murder of little children, you have crossed over. This is the old stuff. Jew-hating pure and simple – Jew-hating which the haters don’t even recognise in themselves, so acculturated is it – the Jew-hating which many of us have always suspected was the only explanation for the disgust that contorts and disfigures faces when the mere word Israel crops up in conversation. So for that we are grateful. At last that mystery is solved and that lie finally nailed. No, you don’t have to be an anti-Semite to criticise Israel. It just so happens that you are.”

He re-states this view when Jacqueline Rose and Churchill herself defend the play. If Jacobson is right then it follows that the play has no artistic or political value.

BBC Radio 4 has decided not to stage the play. Radio 4′s drama commissioning editor Jeremy Howe, rejected the play, writing in an email:

“It is a no, I am afraid. Both Mark [Damazer, Radio 4 controller] and I think it is a brilliant piece, but after discussing it with editorial policy we have decided we cannot run with it on the grounds of impartiality – I think it would be nearly impossible to run a drama that counters Caryl Churchill’s view. Having debated long and hard we have decided we can’t do Seven Jewish Children.”

They have made the wrong decision. If it is a “brilliant piece” of course it should be broadcast. If it is a “brilliant piece” how could it be “countered”? Brilliant theatre does not require something else to be broadcast another night in order to balance it.

Why would Radio 4 not broadcast a “brilliant piece”? The official BBC statement says that “we felt it would not work for our audience.” Why not?

The implication, of course, is that The Jews will not allow the BBC to broadcast this “brilliant piece”.

Tell them its antisemitic. Tell them its unbalanced. Tell them the BBC is biased.

If the piece is antisemitic then its crap. And it shouldn’t be broadcast.

If the piece is “brilliant” then it should be broadcast, and the BBC should stand up to the full wrath of “Israel Lobby” – or as the Independent would say, the “Jewish Lobby“.

David Hirsh

LA Times is carrying antizionist propaganda

Ben Cohen critiques Ben Ehrenreich’s Zionism as Hitlerian concept piece on Z Word.

National Executive declines to endorse Hickey/SFC statement on boycott – Jon Pike

This report is written by Jon Pike, NEC (National HE) member (in a personal capacity)

The national executive met last week and made some important decisions, agreeing the finances of the union, bargaining arrangements, and resolutions for Congress on a variety of matters, including an emergency resolution against the Liverpool University cuts. We will direct readers to the resolutions as soon as they are published by the union.

Towards the end of a long day, there was an important discussion and decision about the union’s international policy. It’s complicated, and perhaps of interest only to those who have followed the debate quite closely. If that’s you, get a coffee, set aside half an hour – this is a long one – and we’ll go through it. I’ll try to present the issues in a neutral way, before suggesting an analysis.

At its 2008 congress in Manchester, UCU adopted Motion 25 – against the view presented here at Engage. You can read it here - and the exact wording of the text is very important. The resolution was proposed by the pro-boycott SWP supporter, Tom Hickey. The President, Linda Newman seconded it. They won, we lost the vote, by a big margin. It’s now generally agreed that the debate was poorly handled, and in particular, there was no main speech against the resolution, and the chair took us straight to the vote.

Immediately after the vote, the General Secretary announced that implementation of Motion 25 would be determined by the NEC.

There was a good deal of opposition to the resolution amongst the membership, and, in the absence of a vote of the membership, twelve members decided to launch a legal challenge.

Months passed.

In the Autumn, and in consultation with the union’s lawyers, the General Secretary drew up a four point programme for the ‘implementation’ of Motion 25, and took this first to SFC (“Strategy and Finance Committee”) and then to the NEC, and both committees approved the four point plan. The four point plan is relatively uncontroversial.

Once the General Secretary’s programme was revealed to the litigants, they dropped their action.

So, what are we to make of this? Who compromised, or climbed down, or got faced down? What was the relation between Motion 25 and the four point plan? What were the competing narratives? After the litigants withdrew their threat, they said, in a press release, that the union had dropped plans for a boycott. I commented on the crucial NEC meeting here. In response to the press release, first the General Secretary issued a public statement, and then Tom Hickey wrote a statement that was adopted by SFC, and eventually published on the union website. The SFC statement looks like the official union gloss on the issues surrounding Motion 25. The status of the SFC statement is, then, important.

SFC is a much smaller, more frequent committee than the NEC, but it is elected from the NEC and accountable to it. Last Friday, in the context of a motion on Israel to be taken to the next Congress, the NEC was asked to endorse the SFC statement. But it declined to do so. Instead, it voted for an amendment to endorse the actions of SFC in a general way, without endorsing the statement. (The actions of SFC amount to this: agreeing the four point plan, and issuing a statement. Since everyone is more or less happy with the four point plan, from the boycotters to the litigants, then endorsing the actions of SFC, absent the statement, is not controversial.)

NEC refused to endorse the SFC statement, because the SFC statement was wrong.

Specifically, as I argued at the NEC, it mischaracterises decisions taken by Congress, and by the NEC. It makes claims about union policy that are simply false, and demonstrably false to anyone who looks at the documents – as you can do now. NEC members spent ten minutes looking at the documents, and a majority seem to have agreed me on this.

Here we go. In the second paragraph of its statement SFC says the Motion 25 “called for an investigation and report into the conditions of education in the Occupied Territories, and specifically for an investigation of the role of one college preparatory to any request of ‘greylisting’ being received.”

This is false, in at least two ways.

First falsehood: The sentence distinguishes between a specific investigation of Ariel and a general investigation and report into the conditions of education in the Occupied Territories. These are two separate entities, joined by ‘and specifically.’ But Motion 25 did not call for a general ‘investigation and report into the conditions of education in the occupied territories.’ There is no possible question about this. The claim in the SFC statement is just false – a fabrication.

The most charitable understanding is that SFC somehow recalled amendment 25A.4. This would have committed us, not to an investigation of conditions on the West Bank in general, but it would have committed us to investigating ‘similar institutions.’ (presumably this means Israeli institutions situated in the occupied West Bank). However, 25A.4 was withdrawn and is not union policy.

Second falsehood: Motion 25 did not call for an investigation of Ariel ‘preparatory to’ any request of greylisting. Rather it called for the investigation of Ariel ‘under the formal greylisting Procedure.’ The greylisting procedures say, roughly, when we get a request for greylisting, we should launch an investigation. There is just no scope under the greylisting procedures for a ‘preparatory’ investigation. The reason for the change from Motion 25 to the SFC statement is straightforward: as some people pointed out at the time, UCU has not received an appropriate request for the greylisting of Ariel. The reason is important. We haven’t received a call from PACBI, or any other organisation, for a greylisting of Ariel because the politically organised Palestinian advocates of a boycott are largely eliminationist, and hence they don’t make Green Line distinctions. It would be a big political step for them to say, effectively, ‘target Ariel, but lay off HUJ, TAU and the rest’. We can’t investigate Ariel under the greylisting procedure, because that procedure is triggered by a call from specific legitimate agencies. We haven’t had such a call. The SFC statement acknowledges that we have not had a call, but it falsifies Motion 25 – which just doesn’t call for a ‘preparatory’ investigation.

The third falsehood has to do with the misrepresentation of NEC decisions.

Third falsehood: SFC says “At its recent meeting, the National Executive confirmed, again by an overwhelming vote, that this investigation would be pursued as part of our wider concern with the condition of academic freedom in a number of areas across the world. The outcome will be reported to our next Congress.”

OK, it gets predictable from here on. Ask yourself, first, what is ‘this investigation’. Either it is the general ‘investigation and report into the conditions of education in the Occupied territories’ or it is the specific ‘preparatory’ investigation of Ariel, or it is nothing. Most promising is the first – the general investigation. But it can’t be that, since this general ‘investigation’ is a figment of the imagination of SFC, and SFC created this piece of fiction after the NEC had met. Perhaps SFC wants a general investigation of conditions on the West Bank. Fair enough. But it’s not part of Motion 25.

The second – the specific ‘preparatory’ investigation of Ariel – was not referred to in any paper presented to the NEC. Nor was it mentioned in the oral presentation by the general secretary. We can’t investigate Ariel under the greylisting rules, as required by Motion 25, so SFC has created another fiction, a ‘preparatory’ investigation. But this ‘preparatory’ investigation, was invented by SFC, after the NEC had met. It can’t therefore have been considered by the NEC.

The SFC statement was full of holes. When I raised this at the NEC, one diligent (and pro-boycott) member said – well, let’s look at the paperwork. Another, soon to be ex-member of the NEC proposed an extension of standing orders, which was welcome, because it gave people time to read the stuff. Once people read the documents, the endorsement was voted down.

Here’s an attempt at an explanation.

Suppose you are an important trade union figure, and a Revolutionary from the SWP. You try to get your union to adopt a controversial policy, so controversial that it might even be illegal. You succeed – your congress is a funny kind of place, all your mates roll up and they’re always up for a fight, especially against the wicked “Zionists”.

But then the trouble starts. Lots of ordinary members hate the policy, and some start resigning. Others keep asking, inconveniently, for a direct say on the policy. Yet others start to mount a legal challenge. What do you do? Well, the Revolutionary thing to do would be to face down the bourgeois courts, take on the lawyers and fight for your policy. Make it a political fight and organise the mass ranks of the membership to demonstrate outside the court, and so on. But you worry that no-one would turn up. Secretly, you know that the mass membership hate this policy, and won’t support you in a legal fight. You’ll lose a political fight about the case – there’ll be no members reaching into their pockets for a fighting fund donation, no demonstrations outside the court. The union’s lawyers tell you that the policy is discriminatory and illegal: if you get to court, you’ll lose inside the court. And if you go to the membership, and offer them a vote, you’ll lose again, spectacularly.

What’s a Revolutionary to do? Well, you’ve got to back down, but you’ve got watch your back. A good way to do this is to back down, but pretend that you’re not backing down. You could do this by going back to the original policy, toning it down, and insisting that you are sticking to your guns. You could issue a statement, petulantly attacking those members who have asked you to keep within the law, insisting that you are just implementing the policy, but then misrepresent that policy so that it looks much more anodyne than it is, and matches up to your plan to ‘implement’ it. You could say – we’re just looking to investigate something, not to take any sort of action.

This, though, is a risky game. If you’re unlucky, someone might remember the actual wording of the original policy. They might go to the trouble of reading the documents, and actually take them seriously. Then they’ll realise that you’ve made stuff up – including the stuff about investigations.

And then, when this is taken to the big committee of the union, people will sit and look at the documents. They’ll see that what you say is there, isn’t there. Your political allies as well as your enemies will say: hang on a moment, this is a bit fishy – this doesn’t say what you say it says! At this point, you can bluster, or you can put your hands up. It’s probably best at this point to put your hands up. But if you bluster, it might go to a vote, and your colleagues will vote down endorsement of your statement, because it’s full of holes. The worst thing is – you’ll have no-one to blame but yourself.

The SFC statement is still on the Union website. Maybe it should be taken down – but it doesn’t much matter: it has zero credibility now. Those such as Mike Cushman and Sue Blackwell who touted the statement around to the press as an ‘accurate’ account of the union’s position, might want to think again.

And everyone involved in the drawing up of UCU’s policy on Israel ought to at least take one lesson from this:

Everything you do, everything you try to pass, on behalf of the 120,000 members of the union, will be scrutinised. If you try to pull partisan stunts, or to misrepresent the policies or decision making of the union for your own ends, you might well come unstuck.

Take a bit of care, please. Don’t try to pull the wool over our eyes. Don’t try to rewrite history. We’re watching.

And it’s our union too.

Jon Pike