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Friday April 20, 2007

Britain’s journalism union votes to boycott Israel

by jonny paul
jta

london | The U.K.’s largest trade union for journalists voted to boycott Israeli goods and called on the government to impose sanctions.

The National Union of Journalists voted at their annual delegate meeting on Friday for “a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions and for the Trades Union Congress to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government and the United Nations.”

The motion was the third clause separated from a larger anti-Israel resolution adopted after an hour of debate. Proposed by the union’s South Yorkshire branch, the larger motion condemned Israel’s “savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon” last summer, and the “slaughter of civilians in Gaza” in recent years.

It was opposed by the Cumberland branch, which said it was too political and not tied closely enough to journalistic matters.

The new motion also condemned the “slaughter of civilians by Israeli troops in Gaza and the Israeli Defense Forces continued attacks inside Lebanon following the defeat of its army by Hezbollah” and called for the end of “Israeli aggression in Gaza and other occupied territories.”

The controversial vote passed by a narrow margin of 66 to 54 after a vote twice failed to give a clear result.

Jewish communal organizations have reacted with concern. The Board of Deputies of British Jews said the boycott call does nothing to advance the cause of peace or to help Israelis or Palestinians, and that the motion taints all British journalists, letting people perceive them as biased.

The Daily Mail journalist Melanie Phillips called it “the madness” of Britain.

“Those who might have doubted that the British media is in general institutionally incapable of reporting the truth about Israel might note the weekend’s remarkable vote by the NUJ to boycott Israel,” she said.

“Israel, of course, is not an apartheid state,” she continued. “That is a baseless and libelous smear. The Lebanon war was not a pre-planned attack. That is a libelous misrepresentation of comments made by Prime Minister Olmert to the effect that Israel had planned for the eventuality of such a war if it was attacked by Hezbollah, — which it was.

“Of course, it is astounding that British trade unionists should seek to ostracize the one country in the Middle East where trade unions enjoy freedom of association and expression, while uttering not a peep against those regimes which really do suppress trade unions and intellectual inquiry,” she said.

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