The hotly debated idea of an academic boycott of Israel is still bubbling away below the surface in the UK, though no trace of it appears on the website of the University and College Union (UCU) - the body that will inescapably be at the centre of the row if it breaks out again.
First the Association of University Teachers and then the lecturers' union Natfhe debated a boycott. Now they have merged to form the UCU - which doesn't yet have a policy on Israel and Palestine but which has members passionately committed to both sides of the conflict who want the new union to back their views.
This week Israel's education minister, Yuli Tamir, urged
the English education secretary, Alan Johnson, to use his influence against a boycott.
Jews sans Frontieres, describing itself as an "anti-zionist blog", takes up our story, commenting acidly on Mr Tamir's view that a boycott would weaken the possibility of a real debate in Israel. He says:
So that's why so much progress has been made in the peace process: no boycott.
Engage is a group formed to combat "left and liberal anti-semitism" which believes that
contemporary antisemitism nearly always appears using the language of anti-Zionism.
Josh Cohen gives his account of the debate among UCU members at Goldsmiths where a proposal to mandate delegates to the union's council against a boycott was defeated and a supporter of a boycott was elected as a delegate.
David Russell thought:
Anything which pressurises Israel (especially, as with this proposal, where it is targeted at an influential group) into behaving like a civilised country is a good thing.
No prizes for guessing where Ilan Pappe would stand on renewed calls for a boycott that surfaced in Ireland: Israeli academia deserves to be boycotted, its most persistent gadfly wrote in the Irish Times.
