Confessions of a failed radical

Quite a few people here have asked me why British academics are boycotting their colleagues in Israel. (That's the kind of question you get if you are a minority Brit here. Lots of people are also interested in the Queen.)

To be honest, I don't think they are any more (and, in practice, almost never did) but it's an interesting question and it perhaps throws some light on both Britain and Israel.

To put my cards on the table, I think it's pretty incontravertible that Israel commits human rights violations in the territories that it occupied after the 1967 war. The Palestinians do too - only last week there was big report from two human rights groups, one of them Palestinian, about widespread torture in Palestinian jails. But the original boycott, back in 2002, was aimed at Israel, so I guess that's what we should deal with here.

The most common question - and this is from people here who, as far as I can make out, oppose the occupation - is why British academics voted to boycott Israel, rather than, say, China or Zimbabwe or any of dozens of other countries where human rights are abused, ignored or simply non-existent (and which also occupy land controversially).

In a way, the proposers of the original boycott answered this question before it was asked. In their letter to the Guardian in 2002 (it's all here on Wikipedia if you want to take a look), they pointed out that many European academic institutions regard Israel - uniquely in the Middle East - as a European state when it comes to handing out grants. (It would be tempting to call this something like the Eurovision Song Contest Paradox, but if you have spent any time in the company of a particular type of British left-wing academic you will realise that, for them, almost nothing is a laughing matter.) Their proposal was that these grants should be suspended until Israel entered into what it called "serious peace negotiations" with the Palestinians.

Whatever the authors' original intentions, however, their letter set off a series of motions, mostly at the meetings of academics' trades unions, that called for a full academic boycott of Israeli institutions and a severing of links between UK academics and their Israeli colleagues. For a few years, things went back and forth and nothing much happened, and then, I think by about 2007, the campaign had all but fizzled out.

There has a been a great deal written about this debate, mostly in terms of academic freedom and the distance universities sometimes like to place between themselves and the "real" world. (It's a little like the argument that sport is above politics.) But that doesn't really answer the questions: why Israel and why Britain. For that, I think it's worth looking at what has happened to those of us on the old anti-Thatcher left in Britain - and, yes, I include myself in this - now that we have become a little more jaded and our political latitude is increasing with our waistlines.

Back in the day, by which I mean the 1980s (sorry, I was having my bar mitzvah when flower power was breathing its last and I never really got into punk) you knew where you were on the left. Although belonging to activist groups often involved long, tedious meetings that droned on into the night, there was a pretty clear pair of enemies: Margaret Thatcher and apartheid South Africa. We probably didn't think too hard about the details at that time (and secretly I rather liked the denationalised British Telecom and the cool things it brought like Call Waiting) but the "cause" was clear.

It was also pretty easy to boycott South African goods. You could buy cheap Chilean wine instead, skip the grapes and feel wonderfully politically correct on your way to that Islington dinner party. (I don't think we had thought much about Pinochet back then, certainly I hadn't.) Besides who needed an account at Barclays?

Unfortunately while we were still debating, our enemies disappeared. Apartheid South Africa collapsed, Thatcher went and was replaced, in the end, by Blair. We all got older (and got mortgages) and, in my area of interest at least, Section 28 was repealed and the age of consent was equalised at 16.

Now, there are few things a leftie hates more than having nothing to hate and, for many people I think, Israel handily filled that gap. For start it feels a bit like the South Africa of old: there are white(-ish) people oppressing brown(-ish) people; it's always in the news but usefully distant from everyday life; and it triggers lots of deeply buried European guilt about colonialism, which we still haven't really come to terms with. So a boycott seemed to be the perfect solution.

The trouble was that Israeli products, Jaffa oranges aside, were not that visible, so boycotting them was going to be harder work. It's a lot easier to pass over a bottle of wine than to steer clear of some bit of technology in your mobile phone that has come out of Tel Aviv's version of Silicon Valley. But there were plenty of joint projects between British and Israeli academic institutions, so the way was clear for the academic unions to come forward with motions that must have felt far more exciting and meaningful than negotiating better wages for ancillary staff at colleges of further education.

My own feeling is that, generally, boycotts don't work and that anyway we tend to be selective about them. (Are we going to avoid watching the Olympics because China has the highest per capita rate of capital punishment in the world?) Besides, I think we can overestimate the effect the boycott of South Africa had, though I'm happy to be corrected on that. I do, of course, respect anyone who works for an end to the conflict here but I am not sure severing ties with some of the most pluralistic universities in the Middle East is the right way to go. Instead it has made us (ie Britain) look somehow dumb in the eyes of thinking people here and that's not good.

I am sure the people behind the boycott had good intentions but if you want to know my position on the conflict, I'm with the Israeli novelist Amos Oz on this one. (The quote is from a piece he wrote for The Nation in 2002.)

Two Palestinian-Israeli wars have erupted in this region. One is the Palestinian nation's war for its freedom from occupation and for its right to independent statehood. Any decent person ought to support this cause. The second war is waged by fanatical Islam, from Iran to Gaza and from Lebanon to Ramallah, to destroy Israel and drive the Jews out of their land. Any decent person ought to abhor this cause."

Shabbat shalom and hope you are having a good weekend.