At present, UK leftists, like US leftists, have no influence whatsoever on their country's government's policy. The point, however, is to change that.
> By contrast, there is a massive
> Palestinian campaign to obtain the boycott of Israeli academia and
> culture, and it is supported by Israeli academics. It has the support
> of sixty Palestinian unions and civil society organisations. The
> union was asked, like the NUJ was recently, to support the
> Palestinians in this, and it would have been ridiculous for the union
> to brush it aside or try and cover it up.
>
> The hysterical response of the Zionists (like Dershowitz promising to
> 'ruin' anyone who supports a boycott) is indicative of how much
> support the boycott movement is getting in the UK and across Europe.
I have not, do not, and will not boycott "Israeli culture," that's for sure!
Boycotts of certain kinds under certain circumstances can be useful tools for movements, but a boycott of all academics of target countries is not one of them. Moreover, overemphasis on boycotts is indicative of the weaknesses of movements in Israel/Palestine as well as the rest of the world. The Iranian and Sandinista Revolutions, to take the most recent examples of social revolution, did not happen because anyone boycotted the Shah and Somoza. Change has to come from within each country and its surrounding region first of all. If, for instance, Islamists, communists, and liberals succeed in taking power in Egypt and changing its policy toward the USA and Israel/Palestine, that will be an incomparably greater blow for freedom than any boycott movement in the West. Our job in the West in the short term is to restrain our respective governments as much as possible from doing harm, and in the long term to take power here ourselves. -- Yoshie