Confronting the NUJ’s Israel Boycott

Back in 2003, when I was still living in London and working as a journalist, I came across a newspaper advertisement slamming Israel which had been signed by a number of British trade unionists. Among them was Jeremy Dear, the Secretary-General of the union I belonged to, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).

Like many other members, I had no meaningful involvement with the union. The only tangible benefit of membership was a press card which you could whip out, should the need arise, to demonstrate your bona fides to a policeman or a government official. But when I saw Dear appending the name of the NUJ to this ad, I decided I’d had enough. Why, I fulminated, should I pay membership dues to a union that had embraced the demonization campaign against Israel? Why should I, even in a small way, subsidize the salary of a man who, in addressing a rally opposing the Iraq war, declared that an invasion of Israel would be the morally correct alternative?

So I cancelled my NUJ membership. To get a new press card, I approached the Chartered Institute of Journalists (CIoJ), which a friend explained was not really a trade union, but more of a professional association. As a valid press card was all I wanted, I didn’t much care either way. Nor was I put off by the Institute’s ornate coat of arms, which conjured up images of knights jousting at medieval feasts. I joined.

It was the right move. In its response to the NUJ’s boycott of Israel, the CIoJ has performed a much needed professional service by reminding British journalists of the core values of their trade. Journalism is manifestly not about passing resolutions. Journalism is about reporting and clarifying, about laying bare the multiple realities which compose a story, in order to allow readers and listeners to make up their own minds.

Which does not mean that journalists, when working as journalists and not engaged in ultra-leftist posturing, cannot allow their own opinions to surface. Nicholas Kristof’s harrowing dispatches from Darfur are one thing, hectoring resolutions from trade union confabs are quite something else. When journalists give opinions, these should gently guide their narratives, not overwhelm them. As for the organizations which represent journalists, these should steer clear of all political issues except the one in which they have a direct stake – press freedom.

Indeed, the NUJ’s boycott vote is actually inimical to press freedom, in much the same way as the boycott of Israeli academics harms the cause of academic freedom. In that regard, it’s instructive that the NUJ has not adopted the academic boycott model, by demanding, say, that the credentials of Israeli journalists in the UK be revoked, or that international wire services stop supplying Israeli media outlets. Appalling as such moves would be, at least there would be an internal logic to them. Instead, the NUJ has signed up to a policy that is much, much worse.

In advocating a boycott of Israeli goods, the NUJ violates press freedom by instructing its members to regard an entire country as contaminated. It frames into policy the disturbing remark I once heard from a BBC acquaintance, who obviously felt so sullied by setting foot among Israeli Jews that he told me whenever he arrived at the airport in Tel Aviv, he couldn’t get to the Palestinian-run American Colony hotel in Jerusalem quickly enough.

When such attitudes become binding on the members of a journalist’s union, there are two consequences. Firstly, it forces even the most skeptical to confront the issue of anti-Semitism; a commentator in The Independent newspaper admitted that while he was reluctant to invoke anti-Semitism as an explanation for the NUJ vote, “I confess that I am unable to find another one.” Secondly, it raises deeper concerns about journalists and how they relate to their public; for if journalists can’t be relied on to report honestly and fairly – if they are mandated by their union not to do so – then what is their purpose?

Which brings us back to the CIoJ. Here is a professional body which says, “We…do not give instructions to our members about what to say or what not to say.” That’s the essence of press freedom. And that is what should guide journalists confronting this boycott, whether they decide to join the CIoJ or whether they elect – as dozens of staff at the BBC, Independent Television News and other outlets are now doing – to stay inside the NUJ and fight.

Ben Cohen is AJC’s associate director of anti-Semitism and extremism.