By IRNA,
London : The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) have condemned the academic initiative announced by Prime Minister Gordon Brown this week as “abject hypocrisy”.
Brown controversially announced the setting up of a British- Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership (BIRAX) when he became the first UK leader to address Israel’s Knesset on Monday.
But BRICUP, the main UK organisation promoting an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, called on British academics to refuse the “blood money” promised for Israeli-British collaboration by way of grants for joint scientific research and exchanges.
“Brown had nothing to say about the systematic sabotage of Palestinian centres of learning and research by the Israeli separation wall, by military incursions and checkpoints, and by the detention of tutors and students,” it said.
The prime minister was accused of turning his eyes away from the cultural and educational deprivation, imposed as a matter of Israeli policy, on the Palestinians when speaking about peace and
collaborative endeavour.
“It is shameful that the representatives of a British Government should take such a selective view of historical oppression,” the committee said, slating the initiative as an attempt to draw a veil over reality.
“It is abject hypocrisy for Brown to praise Israeli achievements in the face of ‘war, terror, violence, threats, intimidation and insecurity'” said Sue Blackwell, a BRICUP activist at Birmingham University in central England.
“Why did he have nothing to say about Palestinian achievements in the face of decades of ethnic cleansing, illegal occupation, political detentions and assassinations of civilians, an illegal apartheid wall through the West Bank and the siege of Gaza?” Blackwell asked.
The announcement of the academic partnership was seen defying attempts by Britain’s biggest lecturers’ union, the University and College, to back a Palestinian-led boycott of Israeli educational institutions accused of collaborating with the Zionist regime.
Tom Hickey from the University of Brighton, in southern England suggested that the 120,000 members of the lecturers’ union, “had clearly hit a raw nerve, to judge from the hysteria in both governments.”
“We have merely suggested that members reflect on their moral consciences, and ask themselves whether they can, with equanimity, continue links with Israeli institutions that are complicit in the attempted extirpation of the Palestinian people, and the colonisation of the West Bank,” Hickey said.
BRICUP urged British and Israeli academics of conscience not to participate in the academic collaborations touted by the British prime minister.