This, for me, is the decisive point. To be a Jew in UCU today is to be, in some sort, a supplicant, pleading with the would-be boycotters and those unmoved to oppose them and deliver them a decisive defeat, pleading for Israeli academics to be accepted as having the same status as other academics world-wide, pleading that Jewish supporters of the rights of academics in the Jewish state should not be made to feel isolated in their own union, like participants willy-nilly in an anti-Semitic campaign. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, shove that. Not today, not tomorrow, and not any time. To be a supplicant Jew is not a choice I would be willing to contemplate. I should come and entreat within the UCU for the same consideration for Jewish academics in Israel and Jewish academics in Britain as are extended to academics of every other nationality? Forget about it.
That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends,
it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it and to institute new Government.
Monday, July 07, 2008
A supplicant Jew
Norm ain't:
A couple of years ago I went to an UCU meeting - AUT as it was then called - to argue, rather rudely, against all this anti-Jewish shite. The most courteous critic at the meeting was a young man with an American accent. He argued calmly but forcefully and persistently. I was impressed. He was, I'd say, ethnically Chinese.
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