"We recognize that this has not been an easy decision faced with the extreme pressure put upon the union by outside forces," said Rose.

CAIRO — Britain's largest lecturers' union backed on Monday, May 30, a motion that calls for boycotting Israeli academic institutions and lecturers who fail to distance themselves from Israel's "apartheid policies," the Guardian reported on Tuesday, May 30.

The measure, which was adopted on the final day of the annual conference of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), hit out at Israeli polices including "construction of the exclusion wall, and discriminatory educational practices" against Palestinian students and teachers.

It urged its members to "consider the appropriateness of a boycott of those that do not publicly dissociate themselves from such policies".

Speakers outlined the difficulties experienced by Palestinian students and lecturers under the yoke of the Israeli occupation and blasted the silence of their Israeli peers.

Delegate John Morgan, who seconded the motion, said there was no academic freedom for the Palestinians.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel sent its support, saying British academics had "proved once again that they are up to the challenge of meeting injustice".

Some union members like NATFHE Secretary General Paul Mackney and Ronnie Fraser, chair of Academic Friends of Israel, rallied against the motion.

Downing Street has dismissed the motion counterproductive.

Last year, delegates at the annual conference of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted to boycott the Israeli Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities because of their complicity in the government's policies.

But after mounting pressure from the Israeli lobby in Britain, the boycott was overturned.

Both the AUT and the NATFHE are expected to be on entity on Thursday, June 1, becoming the world's largest higher education union with more than 110,000 members.

Silent Complicity

Some speakers hit out at what they called the "silent complicity" of Israeli lecturers and academics with the occupation authorities.

"The majority of Israeli academics are either complicit or acquiescent in their government's policies in the occupied territories," said Tom Hickey, a philosophy lecturer from the University of Brighton and a member of the union's national executive committee.

"Turning a blind eye to what an Israeli colleague thinks about the actions of their government is a culpable blindness," added the proposer of the motion.

Stephen Rose of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine, who began the boycott campaign in 2002, praised the motion.

"We recognize that this has not been an easy decision faced with the extreme pressure put upon the union by outside forces," he noted.

He lauded the vote as "an historic step forward" in "helping persuade our Israeli academic colleagues that it is time to cease silent complicity with the illegal acts of the Israeli state."

Rose, a professor of biology at the Open University, first championed the boycott of Israeli academics in 2002, writing to the Guardian calling for a moratorium on European funding of Israeli research.

Boycott of Israeli products and companies have picked pace recently over the aggressive policies of the Israeli government in the occupied territories.

The Presbyterian Church USA has threatened to divest from five American giant companies, accusing them of supporting and helping maintain the Israeli occupation of Palestine.