That’s the upshot of this excellent piece by Mira Vogel on Engage. A member of the UCU, Mira despairs at the absence of any guidance over the appropriateness of a boycott - though I am less surprised, given that the boycott policy has been pushed through by the misfits of the Socialist Workers party, who think such things are a trifle.

Mira highlights the pernicious role played by the Palestinian Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI):

That PACBI holds Palestinian lives cheap is not news, but what does PACBI ultimately want? We don’t know what a lot of the terms PACBI uses mean - ‘liberation’, ‘Zionism’, ‘refugees’ - because PACBI doesn’t define them. But these issues are the sticking points of the conflict, and failure to define them in the context of a boycott call demonstrates a rejectionist agenda. PACBI wants either complete capitulation to this rejectionist agenda, or it wants to be the sole beneficiary of the research grants, cutting out Israel. As if you can manage your water supply in isolation from your neighbours. As if you can plan for climate change in isolation from your neighbours. As if your neighbour’s work on Alzheimers is of no concern to you. This is an exercise in totalitarianism - the anti-Israeli Israeli-Palestinian Brain Research Conference, anti-Israeli
space shuttle experiment, anti-Israeli Stream Restoration Project. Anti-Israelism is the difference between a good joint project and a “misleading and harmful one”. PACBI isn’t interested in ending the conflict and it’s not interested in research or development. It just wants to punish Israel.

Read the rest.