By Paisley Dodds
Associated Press
Tuesday, May 30, 2006

LONDON, May 29 -- Britain's largest college teachers' union voted Monday to consider boycotting Israeli academics over what members termed "apartheid" policies and discrimination against Palestinians.

The 69,000-member National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, or NATFHE, passed the motion at its annual conference in the northern English city of Blackpool.

The group is merging with another teachers' union this week. Trevor Phillips, a spokesman for NATFHE, said Monday's vote would be purely advisory and not set policy for the new, larger union, which will have more than 100,000 members.

Ronnie Fraser, director of the Academic Friends of Israel, said his group would continue fighting the boycott proposal, which he called "racist."

"If the sponsors of this boycotting campaign succeeded in something, it is only to undermine further progress, collaboration and peace in the Middle East and to marginalize the standing of NATFHE," Fraser said.

One part of the motion called on union members to consider whether they should refuse to cooperate with Israeli academics or Israeli research journals that do not "disassociate themselves" from the policies described in the motion.

The measure passed with 106 regional delegates in favor, 71 against and 21 abstaining, Phillips said.

Other parts of the boycott motion that passed with a show of hands cited Israel's "apartheid practices" toward Palestinians, including the construction of a wall to close off the West Bank.

"This resolution's intent is an aggressive assault on the universal concept of academic freedom," said Prof. Yosi Yeshurun, rector of Israel's Bar-Ilan University and chairman of the country's International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom. "It reflects a lack of knowledge of the structure of the Israeli academia, which consists of all the spectrum of Israeli political views."

The proposal reopened debate sparked last year when Britain's 40,000-member Association of University Teachers voted to boycott Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities.

That union said it targeted Bar-Ilan for its links to the College of Judea and Samaria in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. It accused Haifa University of threatening to fire a political science lecturer for supporting a student's research into allegations of killings by Israeli troops.

The universities said many elements of the allegations were false. The boycott was condemned by the Israeli and British governments and overturned after a month.