On Engage, Eric Lee expresses concern about this weekend’s international conference of the South-Eastern region of the UK’s umbrella Trades Union Congress (SERTUC).

Hot on the heels of the UCU’s vote to encourage an academic boycott - a decision which its increasingly bizarre leadership continues to deny was actually made - the SERTUC conference will likely include strident calls for an Israel boycott. As Eric points out, no Israeli speaker will be present, just representatives of the UCU and the odious Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).

Eric adds that he is waiting for a reply to this letter:

“I was wondering why there wasn’t a speaker from Trade Union Friends of Israel, which as I’m sure you know, builds support in the British trade union movement for cooperation between British, Palestinian and Israeli unions — and has done so for many years. Were they not available to attend?”

It’s tempting, when looking at this flurry of boycott activity, to conclude that the UK is the only country where this is a major issue. I put it differently: the boycott campaign is not so much a British problem as an Anglophone one. South Africa, of course, is an important site of boycott activity. Ireland and Canada also figure prominently.

Last month, the conference of IMPACT, Ireland’s largest public sector union, passed a resolution supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. And that decision was made possible through the adoption of the narrative which demonizes Israel: a state born of ethnic cleansing, a state which practises apartheid.

It was this same endorsement of propaganda dressed up as history which led a Quebec student federation, ASSE, to issue the same BDS call just last week.

Both the resolutions discussed above have one more thing in common with the UCU resolution: that boycotting is the only way to avoid complicity with Israel. Ireland’s Trade Union Friends of Palestine puts it, rather clumsily, like this: “we either collude with Israeli terror and violence, which — and this is the really worrying thing — is right in front of our eyes, and thus become brutalized ourselves, or else we can take a stand against it and call injustice by its name — to ’speak truth to power.’”

Say the Quebec students: “ASSE’s important stand also marks a critical opportunity for grassroots student and social movements in Quebec to challenge the Quebec and Canadian government complicity towards Israeli apartheid and today the outright support towards Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Canada’s Conservative government.”

What we have here is the same “not in my name” vanity politics which has proven so popular on the far left. Narcissism is never an attractive quality; but when it’s attached to a campaign that wants to wipe Israel from the map, it’s downright dangerous too.