You can be forgiven for wondering whether, at least in practical terms, the boycotters are worth worrying about. In the last week, initiatives at both the UK and EU levels seem to have rendered them about as relevant as flat-earthers or UFO-watchers.

You have Gordon Brown in Israel actively promoting a new academic research and exchange program. You have the EU program TEMPUS upgrading its links with both Israeli and Palestinian universities - and, for good measure, the program’s director, Jan Figel, scorning the academic boycott at a press conference in Israel. Even within the UCU, there’s a vigorous debate about whether to stay or whether to go, with the underlying premise of both positions being that the boycott is a load of posturing nonsense which has brought shame upon the union.

On Engage, Mira Vogel quite properly asks, “Does this mean that the arguments against antisemitism and for academic freedom are won?”

I have my doubts that this debate will ever be decisively won, if by winning we mean that the boycotters will finally and irrevocably throw in the towel. Deeper and more visible academic cooperation with Israel - which, ironically, the boycotters might themselves have provoked by taking their outrageous, morally repugnant stand - certainly weakens them and, by including Palestinian universities as well, also exposes the falsehood that the development of Palestinian higher education requires that collective punishment be imposed upon Israel. No matter how many ultra-leftist tantrums we see at UCU conferences, these joint programs aren’t going to be cancelled any time soon.

Still, it should also be borne in mind that the boycott isn’t really about meaningful solidarity with the Palestinians. It’s about promoting the dogmas of anti-Zionism, as assembled over the years by a motley crew of Soviet and Islamist propagandists. It is the same hateful, vengeful, totalitarian politics informing the boycott campaign which drive someone like George Galloway - a “disgusting” man, as David T correctly calls him - to claim, about hostages in Iraq: “Nor is there any point in the usual ‘they were only there trying to help ordinary Iraqis’ line. All foreigners - except bone fide journalists - were warned by the resistance from the start to leave. If they did not they would be treated as mercenary auxiliaries to the occupation and would be killed or kidnapped.”

Hence, even as concrete exchange programs and the like undermine the academic boycott, the turbulence of the Middle East, now crystallizing into a confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program, conspires to give it and the ideology beneath it, perfectly expressed in Galloway’s ravings, a new lease of life. Ultimately, this is a political battle, and it is one which will continue.