Unions Urge Boycotts Against Israel

Two major labor unions – one in England and one in Canada – have voted to urge boycotts of Israel over what they view as the Jewish state’s "apartheid policies.”

In Britain, the country’s largest union of higher education instructors voted to recommend that their 67,000 members consider cutting ties with Israeli professors and academic institutions that do not "publicly disassociate themselves” from "continuing Israeli apartheid policies.”

In Canada, the 210,000-member Ontario branch of the nation’s largest labor union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, voted to call for a withdrawal of the union’s pension fund investments from Israel, the Jewish publication Forward reports. Some experts say Islamic terrorism is the motivating factor in the recent anti-Israel moves.

"Islamic terrorism causes people to look for a rational explanation, and they come up with the rational explanation that people have always come up with throughout history – that the Jews are at fault,” Paul Berman, a senior fellow at The New School’s World Policy Institute, told Forward.

But Khalil Jahshan, former president of the National Association of Arab Americans, attributed the anti-Israel activism to "a diverse group of so-called progressive left of center pro-human rights, pro-Palestinian, anti-occupation liberal, sometimes Jewish faculty members.”

The British government issued a statement criticizing the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education’s call for an academic boycott, saying: "We believe that such academic boycotts are counterproductive and retrograde. Far more can be obtained through dialogue and academic cooperation.”