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Israel lobby pressure on Southampton shows signs of desperation

March 25, 2015 at 5:52 pm

As Israel lobby groups in Britain continue to pressure the University of Southampton to cancel an upcoming conference, the desperation is starting to show.

Earlier this week, The Academic Friends of Israel claimed that conference coordinator Professor Oren Ben-Dor had “been removed from the Board” of The Parkes Institute, based at Southampton.

The Academic Friends of Israel is run by Ronnie Fraser, who in 2013 saw his high-profile case against University College Union dismissed entirely by an employment tribunal. In the aftermath, more circumspect Israel supporters described Fraser’s action as a “legal and public relations disaster.”

Ben-Dor’s ‘removal’ was repeated as fact in The Jewish Chronicle under the headline: ‘Professor dropped from university institute over controversial Israel conference’, and also triumphed by groups urging the cancellation of the event.

Today, however, The Parkes Institute confirmed to me that the Israel lobbyists had got it wrong.

Responding by email, Professor Joachim Schlör, Director of The Parkes Institute, clarified that Ben-Dor had indeed once been a member of the institute’s Advisory Committee “several years ago”, a position he occupied as “a representative of our Law School.”

While The Academic Friends of Israel claimed that “as a result of the conference going ahead [The Parkes Institute] removed [Ben-Dor] from their Board”, Schlör told me that there was simply a different “current delegate for the Faculty of Social Sciences” on their committee.

While The Parkes Institute is critical of the conference, it has also made clear that it “fully support[s] freedom of speech within the law.” Indeed, two honorary fellows of the institute are among more than 800 academics who have backed the University of Southampton and academic freedom.

Signatories for the statement of support include chairs, professors, researchers and lecturers from leading universities, including 27 Oxbridge academics, 16 from Ivy League schools in the USA, and more than 160 scholars from Russell Group universities in the UK.

Those seeking to cancel the scholarly gathering have been getting increasingly desperate. Seddons law practice was forced to distance themselves from partner Mark Lewis, after the latter told the Telegraph that he would look less favourably at CVs of Southampton law graduates.

The Board of Deputies’ Jonathan Arkush, meanwhile, has openly called the conference “antisemitic”, an accusation ridiculed by Israeli journalist Seth Frantzman, who wrote about how “many of [the speakers] are Israelis, or former Israelis and more than half the academics at the conference are Jewish, some of them long-time activists.”

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.