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By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 27, 2005; Page A22

LONDON, May 26 -- Britain's largest trade union of university teachers voted overwhelmingly Thursday in a closed-door meeting to repeal a controversial boycott of two major Israeli universities.

The show-of-hands vote, taken at a special session of the Association of University Teachers in London, followed a month of emotional debate in which pro-boycott campaigners drew parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa, while anti-boycott forces accused opponents of fomenting anti-Semitism and damaging academic freedom.

Both sides were highly critical of the Israeli government and its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but they differed on how they could help bring peace to the region.

Those favoring a boycott argued that Israel needed to be confronted and isolated internationally, while opponents contended that the boycott would punish scholars who have been in the forefront of Israel's peace movement. The result was a classic confrontation between radicals and moderates, played out on Internet sites, in old-fashioned classroom debates, and on the letters and opinion pages of the Guardian newspaper, the daily message board of the British left.

The repeal "is not a victory for Ariel Sharon," the Israeli prime minister, said David Hirsh, a sociology lecturer who helped lead the fight to repeal the embargo. At a news conference after the vote, Hirsh said: "This is a victory for the other Israel -- an Israel on campuses where debate and discussion take place -- and not bloodshed."

But Hilary Rose, a sociology professor and leader of the boycott campaign, said that she was unfazed by the vote and that her side's efforts would continue because many Israeli academics were complicit in the repression of Palestinians. "We have absolutely no intention of going away," she told reporters.

At its annual meeting last month, the association, which represents 49,000 educators at 114 British colleges and universities, approved a limited embargo that targeted two Israeli universities -- Bar-Ilan and Haifa. Activists singled out Bar-Ilan because it supervises a degree program at a college in the Jewish settlement of Ariel in the West Bank. Haifa was cited because it allegedly sought to expel an academic in 2002 because of his dissident views. (Haifa officials have strongly disputed the claim.)

Supporters said the boycott would suspend cooperation and prevent joint research projects between British academics and the two schools. It denied Israeli teachers and students from the schools access to British institutions unless they signed disclaimers condemning their government's policies.

The boycott resolution passed 96 to 92, and opponents immediately charged that supporters had stacked the meeting and had not allowed people to speak against it. Within days, critics gathered the signatures required to call Thursday's session.

Then the war of words began. Bar-Ilan took out an ad in the Guardian comparing the boycott to the persecution of academics in Germany before World War II. Twenty-one Nobel Prize winners produced a letter condemning the boycott, while 50 distinguished academics and lawyers, several of them Jews, wrote to the Guardian supporting it. Former South African activists who had opposed the apartheid system of white domination also weighed in, splitting almost evenly pro and con.

Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian academic who is president of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, traveled to London last week with the president of Hebrew University, Menachem Magidor, to sign a statement pledging mutual cooperation and condemning both "academic boycotts and discrimination against scholars and institutions."

Organizers of the boycott said Israel and its supporters had sponsored a well-funded international effort to intimidate the association into repealing the measure. But Jon Pike, a philosophy lecturer at the Open University here who helped lead the fight against the boycott, dismissed the claim. "This is not a well-organized, well-funded campaign," he said. "It is two academics and a laptop who have done a lot of phoning and a lot of e-mail."

Pike and others condemned what they called incipient anti-Semitism infecting British campuses, citing a number of recent incidents. But Bernard Regan, a pro-boycott labor union leader, said such claims were misplaced. "This is not about being against Jews," he told a gathering of pro-boycott campaigners. "It's about being against people who are apologists for the Israeli government and the Israeli army."

Hundreds of academics poured into the Friends Meeting Hall here for the showdown Thursday morning, threading their way through demonstrators for and against the measure. The association, whose leaders seemed shaken by the intensity of the debate and by a threat of a lawsuit from Haifa, said they had been advised by lawyers that the meeting be held in closed session and confined to members.

Walter Sneader, head of the pharmacy school at Strathclyde University in Scotland, said the debate inside was "reasonably well-informed on both sides. It got emotional once or twice but under control."

Those who attended said the show of hands was somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters in favor of two motions repealing the boycott. One of the measures, which Sneader co-sponsored, said the boycott "constituted a significant threat to the free communication of ideas and to fundamental principles of academic freedom."

The second called for a committee to study how the labor movement in Britain could support Palestinian unionists in the occupied territories. Sally Hunt, the association's general secretary, issued a statement saying, "It is now time to build bridges between those with opposing views here in the U.K. and to commit to supporting trade unionists in Israel and Palestine working for peace."