Union plumbs new low

Editorial

Having watered down an earlier anti-Israel resolution and acknowledging he went too far, the head of Ontario's largest trade union this week deflected criticism of the latest salvo in his anti-Israel crusade.

Sid Ryan, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees' Ontario branch, succeeded in getting an anti-Israel resolution passed at last weekend's conference. The motion moves to a province-wide convention in the spring. But the resolution was a somewhat less strident version of the resolution he had proposed earlier, which sought to ban Israeli professors from Ontario universities. The successful resolution calls for CUPE members at Ontario universities to boycott Israeli institutions doing research that could benefit Israel's military.

"This is not about individual academics, this has nothing to do with individual academics," Ryan said after the vote.

This is disingenuous, of course. What are universities without their people? By sanctioning and isolating academic institutions, the union is isolating and vilifying the individuals who make up those institutions, so Ryan's disclaimers are nonsense. Moreover, the distinction is additionally clouded by the fact that, on the one hand, any research could be said to benefit the military, while, on the other hand, no country has shown so clearly than Israel that military technology and research can benefit civilian life.

Again, all of this is too intellectual a refutation of what happened on the weekend. Any attempt to impinge academic freedom, however couched in justifications and clarifications, is anti-intellectual and antisocial. Coming, as this resolution did, from university workers, the affront is that much more atrocious. The effort to boycott universities, whether as institutions or in the form of the professors who make them up, is nothing less than a slap in the face of civilization. A civilization that bans ideas or the people who think them based on nationality is no civilization at all.

It cannot be overlooked that this resolution – and the entire ideological infrastructure on which it rests – is part of a long history. When such attitudes have emerged, they often show up first and most strongly in the places Jews love best. Our enemies know how to get us where it hurts – right in the books.

The tragedy that is CUPE Ontario today is particularly painful given the role Jewish Canadians played in the creation of that union and the entire trade union movement in this country. Solidarity forever? Not with Jews. While the anti-Israel activists who form the tail that wags the union dog these days insist this is not about Jews, but only about the Zionist entity, their failure to take even a moment to speak to Canadian Jews about the centrality Israel plays in our lives is evidence of the sort of wilful ignorance that is necessary for bigotry to thrive.

If there were any doubt about the particular attitude that underscores the attempts at boycotting, vilifying and divesting from Israel, it is betrayed by the practical application these same activists have toward every other contentious conflict in the world. Whether Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Hamas or Hezbollah, the left's cry is: Negotiate! Talk! Engage! With Israel, it's: Boycott! Sanction! Divest!

Surely this says all we need to know.

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