News from Britain’s Trades Union Congress (TUC): its annual conference is urging the British government to “a) condemn the Israeli military aggression and the continuing blockade of Gaza; (b) end arms sales to Israel which reached a value of £18.8 million in 2008, up from £7.7 million in 2007; (c) seek EU agreement to impose a ban on the importing of goods produced in the illegal settlements; and (d) support moves to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement which provides preferential trade facilities to Israel.”

On the website of the valiant Engage, Mira Vogel gets it absolutely right:

Boycotting activists have forced the Trade Union Congress to dedicate mind-boggling amounts of time, energy and aggression to debating punitive sanctions against Israel. The TUC should be ashamed to even be considering abandoning Israeli workers – the ‘Global Solidarity’ section of its Final Agenda is misnamed and even more miniscule than the Green Party’s Autumn Conference international business with its perennial and hostile attention to the tiny state of Israel. Why always and only Israel? is an unavoidable question without any reassuring answer, and the weird singularity of boycott activism against Israel makes most Jews feel rightly insecure. And yet it’s the only aspect of the conference I heard about on the News today, and most of the country must now think the TUC is fiddling while Rome is burnt to a crisp.

A policy of boycotting Israel is a badge of conflict for an organisation, a flat denial of the needs of Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers, nothing to do with solidarity, nothing to do with the labour movement. The TUC should vote it down and ponder instead why the Israeli workers movement might have supported action against Gaza, why it is so important to boycotters to minimise the role of Palestinians in the conflict, and what is to be done to get Israeli and Palestinian workers to recognise their shared interests in ending it.

In many ways, the TUC decision is a depressing reaffirmation of the failure of the left at a time when its interventions should be decisive. Unemployment is rising, the financial institutions whose recklessness landed us in this crisis have wriggled out of any meaningful regulation, and the far right is resurgent across much of Europe - yet British trade unionists respond with gesture politics that are by turns ugly and absurd. This is a world in which “Zionism” is a shadowy global menace, and where Hugo Chavez - the ally of Mugabe in Zimbabwe, of Lukashenka in Belarus, of Ahmadinejad in Iran - is a poster boy for a faux-progressive politics which finds its supreme expression in the movement to boycott Israel.

Writing in The Forward (full disclosure: this is an article in which I’m quoted,) Gal Beckerman says that the boycott movement generally is picking up steam. That is broadly correct, but I don’t think we have arrived at the “South Africa moment” which boycott activist Omar Barghouti crows about in Gal’s piece- at least, not yet.

Let’s remember that apartheid South Africa was, by the 1980s, an absolute pariah, shunned by athletes, pop stars and consumers. By contrast, in the last month the Toronto Film Festival defied the boycotters by showing a series of films about Tel Aviv, Madonna, freshly escaped from the venom of east European crowds offended by her remarks about anti-gypsy racism, ended her tour with a concert in Israel, while Quentin Tarantino lapped up the adulation of Tel Aviv’s cineastes.

I don’t wish to be misunderstood. The BDS Movement is not something to be complacent about. But, in marked contrast to the movement against South African apartheid, it has not universalized its message. Our task is to make sure that it never does.